The elite civil servant occupies a special place in the French imagination. Civil, refined, unflusterable, a steady hand on the state tiller — what James Bond is to the British spy service, the haut fonctionnaire is to the French ideal of administrative governance.
But lately, a new breed of bureaucrat has been prowling the Parisian corridors of government power. High-powered consultants from firms like McKinsey, Accenture, BCG and Capgemini are playing ever-more important roles in delivering basic government services — replacing, or even displacing, a generation of public civil servants.
New figures seen by POLITICO show that McKinsey obtained the lion's share of a raft of recent contracts signed with six consulting firms for COVID-19 related projects, with €4 million out of a total of over €11 million going to the leading consulting firm alone.
Conservative lawmaker Véronique Louwagie, a budget rapporteur on several health files, who obtained the details of the contracts from the health ministry, said she wanted to "sound the alarm" after her findings.
"Generally speaking, hiring consulting firms doesn't shock me too much," she said. But "the frequency bothers me, the acceleration [in recent months] too," she added. "The question today is: Is it normal for an administration such as the health one not to be able to fulfill a number of missions?"
France is by no means the only country to have turned to the private sector to help run the state’s affairs. Many of its neighbors — the United Kingdom, Spain, Germany, Switzerland — have relied on consultancies for years, if not decades.
But a practice that is increasingly seen as normal elsewhere has sparked controversy in France, a country that has traditionally taken great pride in the quality of its civil service and looked askance at the private sector’s intrusions in public matters. News that McKinsey was working on France’s vaccination efforts — first reported last month by POLITICO — was greeted by outrage from opposition politicians.
And yet, France has increased its use of consultancies in recent years, according to a review by POLITICO of public datasets on public tenders, internal documents and interviews with more than 30 professionals from the public administration and consultancies. The French administration has made public at least 575 contracts with private consultancies since October 2018, for services ranging from crafting economic recovery plans to charting a path to carbon neutrality to helping battle the coronavirus.
Work for the public sector accounted for nearly 10 percent of revenues at French consultancy companies in 2018, amounting to €657 million, according to the European Federation of Management Consultancies Associations (FEACO). That puts France ahead of Italy and Spain in terms of spending, which both began using consultancies much earlier, but still behind the United Kingdom or Germany — where revenues from the public sector account respectively for more €2.6 billion and €3.1 billion.
Whether one sees it, as many surrounding President Emmanuel Macron do, as the modernization of an ossified bureaucracy, or as a foreign practice that raises important questions about transparency, accountability and the erosion of the French state, what’s clear is that, with little public debate, private consultancies are playing an ever more important role in the delivery of basic government services.
"I think that the state has lowered its guard and that maybe France has disarmed itself in health matters," Louwagie said. The MP will present her conclusions on February 17.
Zooming with McKinsey
Every day at 5 p.m., top officials from the French health ministry tune in to one of many daily meetings set up to oversee the rollout of vaccinations. What’s different about this Zoom call is that it’s not chaired by a civil servant, but by a consultant from McKinsey & Company.
Since November 30, the American firm has been tasked with rescuing the country’s vaccination rollout, for a total amount of €3.4 million, according to figures obtained by Louwagie. Another €600,000 was billed by the consultancy for the implementation of a "strategic control tower" at Public Health France, the country's health agency.
Since March last year, the government has also hired consultancy Citwell to help out with logistics on vaccines and personal protective equipment, for €3.8 million. It also recruited Accenture for IT services related to the vaccination campaign, for a total of €1.3 million. Another €2.2 million was spread out between Roland Berger, Deloitte and JLL Consulting.
"We have 26 contracts in 10 months, that's one order every two weeks ... That represents €1 million per month and €250,000 per week in consultancies," Louwagie said.
McKinsey's Paris office, JLL, Citwell, Roland Berger, Capgemini and Accenture declined to comment on the record for this story.
The consultancies do not intervene in the execution of policies nor policy choices, the health ministry said in a previous statement, but provide external expertise on logistics and project or data management.
The government declined multiple requests for comment from POLITICO.
The use of consultancies "has really accelerated towards the end of 2020," said Louwagie. "You can wonder if there's some sort of panic effect," she added, as France's sluggish start to the vaccination campaign was criticized in the country.
At least two partners and seven consultants from McKinsey work on the vaccination campaign along with staff from the four other firms and a dozen civil servants, who said they had no option but to rely on this extra help because of increasing burnout and fatigue felt under the pressure of the coronavirus crisis.
“One out of two people is in burnout,” said a health ministry official, who requested to remain anonymous because they were not authorized to talk publicly about the matter. “You have a crisis, a lockdown, plus the vaccine to manage ... It's obvious that there is a need for outside help.
“Even if we could have foreseen it, you don't invent civil servants in six months or a year,” the official added.
A health ministry insider said one public-sector staffer recruited to join the task force left in less than 15 days because of the difficulties of the task, a fact also reported by investigative media outlet Mediapart. By contrast, the consultants don’t count their hours, the insider said.
"[When] I see that some of the missions are aimed at 'managing in an efficient way the strategic stocks of Public Health France,' I cannot help but wonder: Should operations of this nature be managed by the administration itself or is it normal for a mission of this kind to hire an external firm?" said Louwagie.
For McKinsey and the like, involvement in top-level projects comes with high risk of public backlash, but also high potential reward: privileged access to the French ruling class.
The prestigious Boston Consulting Group (BCG) — which has its Parisian headquarters just a few blocks away from the National Assembly — laid out the reasoning behind chasing public-sector accounts, despite their lower margins.
"There is a logic of investing, and investing in particular in people who are senior public servants today, who are influential people in the public sector, who will be influential in the private sector tomorrow,” said Jean-Christophe Gard, a partner at BCG, during an internal online seminar in November, a recording of which was obtained by POLITICO.
Lucie Robieux, a public-sector expert at the consultancy and a former employee of the budget ministry, explained during the same event that the company was “very much involved in discussions at the highest level, at the Elysée [presidential palace] and [the prime minister’s office] Matignon, but also with the directors of the central administrations.”
“This obviously prepares tomorrow’s business and perfectly positions BCG in discussions to influence public decision-makers,” she said.
BCG declined to comment on the record.
The president’s men
France first started to flirt with consultancies in the late 80s, but only really opened its doors after the 2007 election that saw Nicolas Sarkozy ascend to the presidency. The center-right politician had promised to make the French state cost efficient. He hired McKinsey, Deloitte, Cap Gemini, BCG and Accenture for deals worth about €250 million during his tenure.
Those early consultants mostly worked on human resources and digitalization, but some were also hired as head of public transformation, raising eyebrows among policy experts and France’s court of auditors.
Over the years, the company’s connections to top-level politicians improved, to the point where they were sometimes called upon to contribute to legislative work.
In 2015, Macron, then economy minister under President François Hollande, tapped McKinsey to help him draft a bill intended to improve economic opportunity known as Noé, according to internal emails from 2015 of people involved in the matter, obtained by POLITICO.
Macron “personally [chaired] the steering committee,” which included public servants and “qualified personalities” such as Eric Labaye, then head of McKinsey Paris, which was providing background work on the bill, according to one of the emails.
Labaye was a former colleague of Macron, whom he had met in 2007 when both were members of the Attali commission — a high-level group of experts who had been tasked to think of ways to improve French economic growth — and was appointed as head of the Polytechnique elite school in 2018.
The result of Macron’s work with McKinsey was a TEDx-style presentation in November 2015 that is widely seen as one of the first steps on his path toward the presidency and a foretaste of what would become his political platform, with its focus on business competitiveness, digital transformation and fiscal measures to attract investors.
The Noé bill was eventually dropped by Hollande and his Prime Minister Manuel Valls — and it was this disappointment that reportedly motivated Macron to leave the Socialist government and run for president. His early supporters included top consultants like Karim Tadjeddine and Eric Hazan, two senior partners in McKinsey’s Paris office, and Guillaume Charlin from BCG, as unveiled in the so-called Macron leaks, a raft of internal campaign emails published by WikiLeaks in 2017.
Culture clash
After Macron entered the Elysée in 2017, consultancies ramped up their public-sector activities, according to multiple sources and documents from the industry as well as data analysis by POLITICO.
Since October 2018, the French government has had to share information on public tenders. The resulting database shows that at least 575 contracts were signed with consultancies — 137 of them by central administrations, defined as ministries or any other national authority, including their regional or local subdivisions. The data doesn’t contain detailed information, such as a breakdown of services provided, their nature and price tag. Nor does it include contracts signed prior to October 2018 but carried out later, such as the €100 million contract under which McKinsey is working on the vaccination campaign.
McKinsey has also been working on the country’s economic recovery plan, events aimed at fostering tech investments in France at the Elysée and was awarded jointly with other consultancies an €87 million defense contract.
Sourced from Politico- written by Elisa Braun and Paul de Villepin