Government reliance on private consultants

The Washington Post published a piece about how government agencies relied on outside expertise in times of crisis. About half of the article is in regards to the current governor of California (facing a recall election) and his decision to award no-bid contracts to Blue Shield ($15 million) and to McKinsey ($13 million). Other parts of the article talk about the federal government, as well as some states that did not rely on outside consultants.

Apparently, the primary reason for the current governor of California to rely on consultants was "equity" (to deliver vaccine doses to communities of color). At least one critic has pointed out a lower percentages of Black and Latino residents are fully vaccinated in California. The lower percentage in and of itself might not be adequate reason to indicate that the consultants were not effective (for example, the percentages could have been even lower without the consultants); the problem is that there is no way of measuring what would have happened without the consultants, so no one really knows how valuable (if at all) the consultants' work was. A bigger problem is that the governor's decision to rely on outside consultants expresses a lack of confidence in the state's public health agency, which seems to have received $214 million from the state's General Fund for the 2020-2021 fiscal year. Is it reasonable to expect that a public agency with that annual budget might be in a better position to respond to a public health crisis than private consultants? If not, why is that?

At the federal level, some employees seem to report that the government paid expensive consultants to take notes and organize the information in presentations, and that even still, consultants made mistakes that were caught by public officials. Perhaps most surprising is that the state of Ohio paid McKinsey almost $9 million to "help us tell our stories" -- apparently not to actually accelerate vaccine distribution. Perhaps this general reliance on private consultants for a public function speaks to a more systemic problem with our governments.