August 11, 2020

The State of Washington has given international consulting firm McKinsey & Company three lucrative, no-bid contracts to provide information and management services because, despite the size of state government, Jay Inslee was ill-prepared to make the many decisions required  by the coronavirus pandemic and his own emergency orders.  In June, Inslee signed a $165,000 per week contract with the very expensive consultants at McKinsey, to provide access to a “Governor’s Decision Support Tool”, which apparently aided state officials in determining when to re-open portions of the state’s economy (though it didn’t help them get it right).  Earlier in May, the embattled Employment Security Department (ESD) signed a $142,000 a week contract with McKinsey, this time to help the incompetent bureaucrats at ESD respond to the historic theft of taxpayer funds which the Inslee Administration allowed to take place. The Washington Health Care Authority also gave McKinsey $1.2 million dollars to provide a system to track positive COVID-19 patients who are also on the state’s Medicaid rolls.  Obviously, there are many questions regarding these large no-bid contracts going to an outside consulting firm, and whether major donors to the Inslee campaign helped direct these contracts.  The primary question we have is this: why do we keep expanding the size and cost of government, when it apparently is unable to perform basic services during a crisis and must spend millions on an outside firm to do the job for the state employees already getting paid to do them? (Northwest News Network)

We look forward to the response from the environmental community, which is most consistent funding source for Gov. Inslee’s campaign, to the fact that 41 states have decreased their carbon emissions, while Washington State is going the other way, and has increased carbon emissions by 4%.  Washington State, under environmental policies written and implemented by the Inslee Administration, has continued to fail to meet environmental targets and has actually created more environmental damage, according to a report produced by the World Resource Institute.  Just further evidence that many environmental programs proposed by local Democrats do extraordinarily little (or nothing) to help the environment, but are really covers to implement higher taxes and make government larger and more intrusive. (Grist)

Despite ESD claims that staff has finally (after four months) cleared up the backlog of benefit applications, there are still an estimated 30,000 Washington residents who have not received their first unemployment checks.  While the poorly managed department has finally determined that these individuals qualify for payments, the extremely patient individuals have not yet been informed when they will receive a check for back payments, or when they can expect regular payments to start. (Everett Herald)