Treasury Influence Map
Treasury officials have unique skills in making economic policy and fighting financial crime, with former U.S. Deputy National Security advisor Juan Zarate calling them “guerillas in grey suits.” In the private sector, ex-Treasury officials leverage their unique skill set, deep financial knowledge, and extensive networks to navigate the complex intersection of government policy and business interests. We wanted to answer the question - where do they that - and for who?
Analyzing publicly available data, Castellum.AI looked at the current employment of 6,500 ex-Treasury employees (excluding the IRS), and mapped out where ex-Treasury employees currently work, by industry and by employer. An important note, this is not a power ranking, this is an influence map. We examine only the quantity of ex-Treasury employees, not their experience levels. Having one ex-OFAC Director, for example, is much more useful to an organization than having 50 ex-OFAC interns.
What our analysis does show, however, is which organizations have the biggest needs in terms of compliance and economic policy, either internally, or as a service provider to organizations with compliance and economic policy needs. For some organizations, it could also be looked at as their commitment to compliance, or lack thereof. For example, when Binance received a $4.3 billion fine for sanctions and anti-money laundering violations in November 2023, it only had one ex-Treasury person on staff.
The above graph shows the top twenty non-government industries which ex-Treasury talent flowed into. While some aspects are not surprising (finance and law), a notable data point is that the category of financial services (which includes FinTECHs like Block and Lending Club, payments companies like Stripe and Western Union, and asset managers like BlackRock and Blackstone) gathered significantly more talent than banking, showing both the growth of non-bank finance, as well as the area’s compliance needs. And although towards the bottom of the top twenty, that almost 100 ex-Treasury employees have went into Venture Capital or Private Equity shows their ability to understand and forecast the direction of the markets and where existing incumbents are not meeting client needs.
Drilling down into which employers have nabbed the most ex-Treasury talent, America’s big four banks and the big four accounting firms are hoarding talent and paying well for it. This reflects the banks’ size and compliance needs, as well as the desire of the big four to have top talent to service their own clients’ needs. At these and other companies, ex-Treasury employees tend to focus on compliance, policy making, trust and safety, communications and investment decision making.
What is revealing is that some big tech companies, (Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft and Meta), are hiring almost as many ex-Treasury employees as America’s biggest banks, reflecting the enormous payments infrastructure at these companies and the extent to which they invested in creating marketplaces and their own payment systems, which they now have to supervise. By comparison, Netflix has zero ex-Treasury employees, and Tesla and Nvidia have one each, due to these companies largely outsourcing the payments parts of their businesses to third parties.
Ex-Treasury employees are an entrepreneurial bunch, with one the largest employers being “Self Employed / Freelance” and their ventures ranging from tech and compliance consulting to a coffee roastery. They are also sharing what they’ve learned, with universities a top landing spot. DC-based Georgetown University leads the pack, with the University of Maryland system and George Washington University close behind, the University of California system and Stanford draw talent to the west coast, and Harvard and New York University round out the the top university landing spots.
We also looked at the background of the most senior Treasury officials, going off of a list published by the Treasury Department. All of these persons are eminently qualified for their roles, but what we wanted to see was how many of them are returning to Treasury from the private sector. While it is easy to lob a “revolving door” charge at government employees returning from the private sector, Treasury has the problem of being unable to attract enough talent with both government and private sector experience. This is a problem given America’s role as a financial superpower and the complexity of financial markets, and the need for regulators to be up to speed on what is happening both on and off Wall Street. As for the reason for Treasury’s difficulty in getting talent to return, the reasons are quite simple: the private sector has much higher salaries and remote work.
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Methodology
Data us updated as of December 2023. We relied on publicly available LinkedIn data, which relies on self-reporting. This means that if someone puts down their employer as “N/A” but actually works at JP Morgan, the data will show “N/A” and likewise, if someone did not list their Treasury experience, we will not be able to ascertain their Treasury to private sector path. “N/A” types of entries, however, formed less than 1% of the total dataset analyzed.
We consolidated different employers entries under parent corporations. For example: Deloitte + Deloitte & Touche + Deloitte Australia + Deloitte Consulting + Deloitte Digital + Deloitte Fas Llp + Deloitte Tax Llp = Deloitte.
The IRS was excluded because it is functionally independent of other sections of Treasury, with a mission that is focused on determining, assessing, and collecting internal revenue in the United States. The IRS’ mission is not focused on economic policy and financial crimes compliance—which is the target of this analysis. The IRS is also the largest of Treasury’s bureaus and adding ex-IRS data would severely skew this analysis towards the tax profession.