Insiders say a multimillion dollar McKinsey-fueled overhaul of the country’s intelligence community has left it less effective.
America’s vast spying apparatus was built around a Cold War world of dead drops and double agents. Today, that world has fractured and migrated online, with hackers and rogue terrorist cells, leaving intelligence operatives scrambling to keep up.
They said McKinsey helped complicate a well-established linear chain of command, slowing down projects and turnaround time, and applied cookie-cutter solutions to agencies with unique cultures. In the process, numerous employees have become dismayed, saying the efforts have at best been a waste of money and, at worst, made their jobs more difficult.
Story continues“At CIA, they shattered longstanding structural constructs that people had invested their whole careers in,” said Larry Pfeiffer, a 32-year intelligence veteran who now serves as the director of the Michael V. Hayden Center for Intelligence, Policy and International Security at George Mason University.
The restructuring is “a work in progress,” an ODNI spokesman said, but one that has shown “a number of positive early returns.” And while the Office of the Director of National Intelligence has leveraged McKinsey’s expertise in “change management and organizational design,” the firm’s role was “limited,” he said, and the project was run primarily by ODNI’s internal leadership team. The sentiment was echoed both by an NSA spokesperson and a former CIA official.
Still, when the intelligence community started looking for outside consultants to help with its reorganization, McKinsey was a logical choice, given its long history of helping government agencies with all manner of logistical challenges. Intelligence agencies were angling to break down any communication silos, given the modern threats that cut across numerous corners of the spying world.
As a result, some projects intended to make intelligence collection more effective were pushed back or put on ice altogether, The Washington Post reported last year, as disgruntled employees left the agency. The CIA, which hired McKinsey in 2015, went through similar changes that irked many at the agency, according to current and former employees.
A former CIA official who witnessed the transformation said the reorganization “was overwhelmingly led by a team of senior CIA officers” and noted that the CIA changes “were big and have largely survived” under President Donald Trump “because they were needed and were very widely accepted and praised.”
ODNI, which also brought McKinsey on board for restructuring, suffered from many of the same issues that employees complained about at the NSA and CIA, according to several current and former intelligence officials. With the more recent intelligence community restructuring, officials have also been vexed by what appears to be a lack of a competitive bidding process — McKinsey seemed to seamlessly transition from working with CIA, to NSA, to ODNI via no-bid contracts, these people said, despite lingering skepticism over the firm’s effectiveness.
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