Romney, McKinsey-Style Management, and the Question of Running Government Like a Business

One of the signature promises of Mitt Romney's 2012 presidential campaign was that he would bring a businessman's discipline to the federal government — and reports that a President Romney would turn to McKinsey & Company-style management consulting to review and restructure the government gave that promise its sharpest form.

The appeal was easy to see. Romney had built his career identifying inefficiency: at Boston Consulting Group, where he worked briefly after earning his MBA from Harvard Business School; at Bain & Company, where he rose to run the firm; and at Bain Capital, the private equity firm he co-founded in 1984. The pitch was that the federal government suffered from the same bloat, duplication, and misaligned incentives he had spent his career correcting in the private sector — and that the same analytical toolkit could yield significant savings for taxpayers.

Critics of the idea raised several objections. Government exists to serve public functions — including many that are deliberately not profit-optimizing — that management consulting frameworks are not designed to evaluate. Efficiency in the private sector often means layoffs and service reductions; the same logic applied to government would mean cutting services that citizens depend on and that often serve the most vulnerable populations. A cost-benefit analysis that treats a rural post office or a disability program as an underperforming business unit is asking the wrong question about it.

Supporters countered that waste, duplication, and bureaucratic inefficiency in government were genuine problems costing taxpayers billions annually, and that rigorous analytical scrutiny of federal spending was overdue regardless of which party implemented it.

The debate illustrated a perennial tension in American political life: the appeal of businesslike efficiency in government set against the reality that democratic governance serves purposes and constituencies that don't fit neatly into a consultant's deck.