Well, here’s your problem…

According to a whistleblower, Jared of All Trades, Apprentice of Not Much invited “volunteers” to his task force from some of the country’s most prestigious consulting groups:

The coronavirus response being spearheaded by President Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, has relied in part on volunteers from consulting and private equity firms with little expertise in the tasks they were assigned, exacerbating chronic problems in obtaining supplies for hospitals and other needs, according to numerous government officials and a volunteer involved in the effort.

About two dozen employees from Boston Consulting Group, Insight, McKinsey and other firms have volunteered their time — some on paid vacation leave from their jobs and others without pay — to aid the Trump administration’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, according to administration officials and others familiar with the arrangement.

Although some of the volunteers have relevant backgrounds and experience, many others were poorly matched with their assigned jobs, including those given the task of securing personal protective equipment (PPE) for hospitals nationwide, according to a complaint filed last month with the House Oversight Committee.

For those of you who have never had a consulting group experience, these few paragraphs sums up just about everything worng with how business has been run in the last 25 years.

From everything I’ve seen, consulting groups consist of overpaid business analysts whose primary talent is making gigantic decks of PowerPoint slides. But not just any PowerPoint slides. These are templates with corporate colors and swirly arrows that double over on themselves and unnecessary process flow diagrams for a process that doesn’t look like that, therefore can’t be improved.

Anyway, a true analysis of a system takes months of surveys and interviews and spaghetti diagrams and number crunching and I’m sorry but ain’t nobody got time for that in the middle of a pandemic. If the Trumpists had just maintained the government they had inherited and filled in the gaps like we expected them to, they wouldn’t be wasting everybody’s time with a bunch of Pete Buttigieg-esque guys in neat little suits trying to optimize a system they know nothing about.

Seriously? We’ve got business consultants volunteering their vacation time for this, the largest natural catastrophe in a hundred years? We’ve got a Coronavirus SWAT team consisting of unpaid consultants with a week or two of vacation time to spend analysing the supply chain of the world’s greatest superpower and dozens of administrative departments?? I’m having trouble wrapping my head around this. I have to reread it over and over to try to understand why anyone would run a government like a rundown summer camp on a DIY show. Who put Jared in charge? I want to speak to the manager.