Private consultants have been running key parts of the governmental response to the Covid-19 pandemic, and that isn’t always producing the best results, according to an analysis by The Washington Post’s Isaac Stanley-Becker.
The service contracts for consulting services signed by federal, state and local governments can be quite costly, Stanley-Becker says, and tend to leave states without the internal resources and capacities they need to respond to this and other crises over the long term.
“At least 25 states, along with federal agencies and many cities and counties, hired consulting firms,” Stanley-Becker writes. “The American vaccination drive came to rely on global behemoths such as McKinsey and Boston Consulting Group (BCG), with downsized state and local health departments and even federal health agencies relying on the private sector to make vaccines available to their citizens.”
While the consultants say they are providing essential services and specialized expertise, critics charge that the contracts, which are often awarded on a no-bid basis, are difficult to monitor, with little oversight of the goals and work product. In one example cited by Stanley-Becker, an official said that California paid Blue Shield and other consultants millions of dollars to do work that was already being done by state employees.
In a more critical example at the national level, Stanley-Becker reports that Boston Consulting Group has been paid more than $9 million to develop a plan to distribute Covid vaccines across the country, with the contract calling for the delivery of “robust central infrastructure” to coordinate the effort at all levels of government. But coordination of the vaccine effort has been notably lacking, especially in the beginning of the year, and neither the consultants nor officials at the Center for Disease Control and Prevention can identify any “robust central infrastructure” that has been created by the consultants.
“It’s another example of the government farming things out, and often to the wrong folks,” Jeffrey P. Koplan, a former CDC director, told Stanley-Becker.
Even when the consulting firms do provide obviously necessary services, their know-how disappears as soon as their contracts end. “The contractors leave and we’re not retaining that expertise,” Robin Taylor Wilson, former chair of the American Public Health Association’s epidemiology section, said. “So the next time an emergency hits, we’re going to have another delayed reaction.”
