The Treasury is overwhelmingly white and male — and officials say it's become a problem

The U.S. Treasury hasn't had many policy disagreements lately. That's not necessarily a good thing.

It's no secret that President Trump's top officials at the Treasury Department are largely white, male, and wealthy. That lack of diversity recently sprouted to the surface as delays stymie a proposal to put Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill. But as current and former officials tell Politico, that's just a public manifestation of a much deeper problem.

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin regularly conducts meetings with about 20 senior officials, of whom just three are woman and one is a person of color. The Treasury's hiring of minorities also "fell to its lowest pace in five years" in 2018, Politico notes via department statistics. This homogeneity has manifested into "fewer policy disagreements" than in the past, one former official tells Politico. But that's just because, as a current official puts it, the department's overwhelming privilege just feels "disconnected from reality." Another former official was more blunt: When people lacking in diverse "gender, race, ethnicity and financial perspective" make policy, it's "f---ing frightening," they told Politico.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

A delay in what was supposed to be the 2020 introduction of a Tubman $20 bill sparked mentions of the department's lack of diversity and even accusations of racism. But "more than a dozen current and former Trump administration and Treasury officials ticked off examples that openly highlighted the lack of diversity" far beyond the Tubman example, Politico says.

A Treasury spokesperson defended the current administration's hiring practices, saying the Treasury's entire workforce is 44 percent women under Trump and was 48 percent women under former President Barack Obama. Read more at Politico.