ABC News(WASHINGTON) — Less than 24 hours after being given permission by McKinsey and Company to disclose his client list at his former employer, South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg is shedding light on his years at the elite consulting firm.”I believe transparency is a quality the American people should expect from their president,” Buttigieg said in a statement released late Tuesday afternoon. “I also believe that the American people should be able to trust that their president will keep their word and commitments they’ve made.” Bound by a nondisclosure agreement, Buttigieg made a public call to McKinsey on Friday to reveal his clients, and the company decided on Monday to allow the mayor to discuss the entirety of his work from 2007 to 2010, his first job after completing school.”Now, voters can see for themselves that my work amounted to mostly research and analysis. They can also see that I value both transparency and keeping my word. Neither of these qualities are something we see coming out of Washington, especially from this White House. It’s time for that to change,” Buttigieg said.In 2007, he served Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan for three months as his first study. Buttigieg was assigned to a team that looked at overhead costs such as rent, utilities and company travel and was not assigned to look at policies, premiums or benefits.
For half of 2008 he worked in the Toronto area analyzing prices for Loblaw’s, a grocery and retail chain. He spent another three months that year serving a division of Best Buy to investigate opportunities for selling more energy-efficient home products in their stores.From winter 2008 through spring 2009, Buttigieg worked mostly in Connecticut on research to fight climate change by improving energy efficiency on a project co-sponsored by the Natural Resources Defense Council, Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Energy, other nonprofit groups and several utility companies.In 2009, he worked in California for The Energy Foundation to research energy efficiency and renewable energy. That same year, he also worked in Washington, with trips to Iraq and Afghanistan, for the U.S. Department of Defense. His final project for McKinsey was from 2009 to 2010, analyzing potential new sources of revenue for the U.S. Postal Service.Buttigieg’s campaign said they had been reaching out to McKinsey since June to see if he could be released from his NDA.Recently, the mayor had been under increased pressure to reveal his work while at the firm — even pushed by Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot at a forum in Iowa on Friday to “break the NDA.”Buttigieg was peppered with questions by reporters about McKinsey after the event, and said he would consider breaking the agreement, but wanted to give the company some time “to do the right thing.””To act on my values I have released all my tax returns since I completed my education, a standard that, unfortunately, no other candidate in this race has been willing to meet. It is also why I released a summary of my work at McKinsey even though it was my first job out of school where I had little decision making authority,” Buttigieg said in his statement on Tuesday. “It is also why I worked to be released from my confidentiality agreement with the firm, so that I could responsibly release this information, instead of accede to political pressure to violate the agreement.” Copyright © 2019, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.
