Investigation“Le Monde” publishes, for the first time, an open database that lists nearly 1,600 consultancy services for the public sphere. The result of a long investigation.
Assistance in the design of innovative projects, application maintenance in agile mode, support for inclusive innovation approaches, evaluation modules for senior officers… The list of missions entrusted by the State and its operators to consulting firms private is an impressive mishmash, from the most technical services to the most incongruous orders.
Publishing such an inventory was not easy. It will first have been necessary the revelation by Politico, in January 2021, of the role of the consulting firm McKinsey in support of the French vaccination campaign. The controversy that followed led to the opening of a senatorial commission of inquiry into the influence of private consulting firms.
The senators, who delivered their conclusions on Thursday, March 17, first hit a wall: there is no centralized database allowing them to count and analyze all the missions of consultants for the public sphere. . A situation that makes “difficult, both for the State and for civil society, to have an objective view of the place occupied by these firms in public policies”. To remedy this, the commission of inquiry calls for the publication of this data each year as an appendix to the finance law, in the form of open data.
In the meantime, the senatorial report ventures for the first time to deliver a figure, although imperfect: the senators have counted 945 consulting missions. The worldwhich investigated in parallel, identified hundreds more, arriving at a total of nearly 1,600 contracts since 2015, for an estimated amount of nearly 2 billion euros – figures probably lower than reality .
Who works for which ministry or entity? For what types of missions and what amounts? The world publishes, in a searchable table, the list of all the contracts identified in the context of this survey.
“Consultocracy”: a five-year period of advice
Invisible, but omnipresent, what is the real influence of private consultants in the conduct of state affairs? This is the question posed by the Senate Committee on the influence of consulting firms on public policy, which issued its report on March 17. In parallel, The world conducted its own investigation, based on testimonies, open sources and requests for access to documents, to try to measure the impact of these firms on Emmanuel Macron’s five-year term.