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| Klingons have paid millions to a consulting firm to help with reorganization |
| 2015-07-03 |
| [WAPO] The CIA has paid more than $10 million to a management consulting firm advising senior U.S. intelligence officials on a broad reorganization that agency Director John O. Brennan began earlier this year, current and former U.S. officials said. The agency also is requiring some of its departments to surrender portions of their annual budgets in an effort to collect enough money to cover other costs associated with the restructuring, officials said. The payments to the firm, McKinsey & Co., have been viewed with skepticism by some at CIA headquarters and on Capitol Hill at a time when the agency is confronting significant new security threats as well as pressure to trim costs. Several current and former U.S. officials said they were surprised by the magnitude of the consulting contract, an arrangement that officials said Brennan did not mention to workers when he announced the reorganization or explain to lawmakers in briefings. "What is the rationale?" said a U.S. official familiar with the contract. "When you're talking about millions and millions of dollars, there ought to be a reason why the money is being spent." Be a shame to see all of those bright young minds with new clearances and poly's leave the project after contract expiration. The sum paid to McKinsey represents a tiny fraction of a CIA budget that is believed to exceed $12 billion annually. But current and former U.S. officials said they could not recall a previous case in which the CIA had hired an outside consulting firm at such expense. CIA spokesman Dean Boyd declined to comment on the contract or overall cost of the reorganization, but said the agency is "implementing this plan within our existing budget and without seeking additional funds from Congress." A spokesman for McKinsey in Washington declined to comment. None of our 'members' in our 105 global offices are authorized to discuss client affairs without client and corporate approval. Pardon the redundancy. McKinsey, which specializes in advising companies on management issues and corporate restructurings, was hired to help carry out what CIA officials have described as one of the most ambitious reorganizations in the agency's history. Interesting, what could McKinsey know about the intelligence community? Could this be what it's all about ? Yet another Clinton Foundation link, who knew ? |
| Posted by:Besoeker |
| #4 ...It's been my experience that when a business becomes incapable of performing its core functions, the restructuring merry-go-round starts. Sometimes they can, with immense luck, land on the right combination of ideas and capabilities. Most of the time they're rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. And if we get hit this weekend, I hope and pray that when the CIA says, "We never saw this coming," someone has the courage to hold up that report about not-enough-GLBT-agents and say, "Yeah. We know." Mike |
| Posted by: Mike Kozlowski 2015-07-03 18:03 |
| #3 ...It's been my experience that when a business becomes incapable of performing its core functions, the restructuring merry-go-round starts. Sometimes they can, with immense luck, land on the right combination of ideas and capabilities. Most of the time they're rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. And if we get hit this weekend, I hope and pray that when the CIA says, "We never saw this coming," someone has the courage to hold up that report about not-enough-GLBT-agents and say, "Yeah. We know." Mike |
| Posted by: Mike Kozlowski 2015-07-03 18:03 |
| #2 Gays and Transvestites as spies? Might work given some of the odd sexual appetites of some foreign operatives and diplomats. I guess now that we are all throwing the closet out in the street and being gay is supposedly de-stigmatized, and that means blackmailing a high ranking official into cooperating has gone bye bye...NOT |
| Posted by: Bill Clinton 2015-07-03 12:19 |
| #1 The CIA has a bigger problem. The Central Intelligence Agency is once again mired in crisis. CIA Director John Brennan finds himself “deeply concerned.” The spy agency he runs suffers from an affliction that he says has “persisted despite repeated efforts by Agency leaders to address it.” What is ailing this vital guardian of national security? The CIA’s upper echelon, Mr. Brennan said on Tuesday, does “not reflect the diversity of the Agency workforce or of the nation.” Mr. Brennan was commenting on the “Director’s Diversity in Leadership Study,” an unclassified report released that day. The study comes to the “unequivocal conclusion,” he said in a statement, that there has been a major failure at the agency in the “crucial” area of diversity and inclusiveness. . . . The report is unsparing. Senior positions at the “highest levels of the CIA” are “consistently occupied by white male career officers.” While minority officers make up 23.9% of the CIA workforce, the higher echelons of the CIA don’t come close to that number. For example, the Senior Intelligence Service, the crème de la crème of the spy agency’s personnel, manages only a 10.8% minority composition. Spies with disabilities and LGBT spies, according to the report, are no better represented in the CIA’s upper leadership, though women are generally faring well. |
| Posted by: Deacon Blues 2015-07-03 10:48 |