The aim of this paper is to study how public sector organizations’ use of private consultants affects the public sector ethos. In a rule-based democratic society, the legitimacy of the public service rests on its capability to perform its tasks while upholding values such as impartiality, legality, transparency, accountability and a responsible use of resources – efficiency. The focus is on how public organizations recognize public sector values when they plan for, procure and evaluate the performance of private consultants. With reference to a pre-defined public sector ethos and based on a survey to procurement officers in Swedish central government agencies (N=159), it analyses the types of consultants used, the reasons for hiring them and the policies applied in the process. The main findings are that the agencies use consultants for a variety of reasons including core activities and that factors internal to the agencies drive the need for consultants. Also, while agencies appear to acknowledge many public sector values in decision making concerning the hiring of consultants, only a few of them have guidelines or policies to support the public sector ethos in agency – consultant relationships. Surprisingly, agency specific factors such as task and size, are not associated with the (limited) variation in these matters.