Dave McCormick-Led Hedge Fund Shed Hundreds Of Jobs After Pocketing State Money

Dave McCormick, an extremely wealthy hedge fund manager running as a Republican for U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania, has built much of his political persona around his record of creating jobs.

During his run for Senate last cycle, McCormick cited both his tenure as CEO of online auction startup FreeMarkets in the early 2000s and leading the hedge fund Bridgewater Associates from 2017 to 2022 as evidence of his job-creating credentials.

“I was a leader of a company with my colleagues that created 600 jobs in Pittsburgh,” he said in a Fox News interview in May 2022. “I then went on to run another global company. I know what it takes to create jobs.”

McCormick’s claims about his work at FreeMarkets have already wilted under scrutiny. As a candidate in 2022, McCormick initially said he had created 1,000 jobs in Pittsburgh, when in fact his failure to generate that amount led to the partial withdrawal of a Pennsylvania state grant premised on hitting that marker.

But McCormick’s more recent work at the helm of Bridgewater, a company based in Connecticut that is the world’s largest hedge fund, paints his record as a job creator in an even less flattering light and could become a potent campaign talking point for incumbent Sen. Bob Casey, McCormick’s all-but-certain Democratic opponent. McCormick, a highly touted GOP recruit, is key to his party’s plans to retake the Senate in 2024.

McCormick presided over a 400-plus person reduction at Bridgewater, despite the company receiving a $52 million subsidy package from Connecticut’s Department of Economic and Community Development in 2016 as part of the state’s First Five Plus initiative, according to the Connecticut Mirror. After exiting the agreement in March last year, CT Insider