Wally Adeyemo

Wally Adeyemo (L) with Barack Obama and Susan Rice

Wally Adeyemo serves as Deputy to Janet Yellen. Wally Adeyemo is working with Charles P. Rettig to implement the Inflation Reduction Act's Internal Revenue Service provisions. He has previously served on the Advisory Council of National Security Action, which was founded "with the goal of opposing the destructive policies of the Trump administration...".

Wally Adeyemo served as interim chief of staff for BlackRock's CEO, Laurence D. Fink from 2017-2019. From 2019 to his time in the Biden Administration, Wally Adeyemo served as the first president of the Obama Foundation.

Wally Adeyemo was born in Nigeria.

Bio

Wally Adeyemo's official government bio verbatim:

On March 26, 2021, Wally Adeyemo was sworn in as Deputy Secretary of the Treasury. He has been at the center of many of the country’s major economic policy decisions since the 2008 Financial Crisis and has worked in organizations across the public, private, and non-profit sectors to build a stronger and fairer economy.

As Deputy Secretary, Adeyemo serves as the Treasury Department’s number two official and chief operating officer. Adeyemo has taken a leading role in Treasury’s national security, economic inequality, and pandemic-related economic recovery work, while supporting the Secretary in driving the Department’s fundamental mission: promoting economic growth and ensuring the financial security of the United States.

This is Adeyemo’s second tour at the Treasury Department. His first began in the early days of the Obama Administration, during the depths of the Great Recession. Rising through a variety of leadership roles at Treasury, Adeyemo became Senior Advisor and Deputy Chief of Staff under Secretary Tim Geithner and Secretary Jack Lew, as well as chief negotiator for the Trans-Pacific Partnership’s provisions on macroeconomic policy.

From 2015 to 2017, Adeyemo served in the Obama White House as Deputy National Security Adviser for International Economics and Deputy Director of the National Economic Council. Adeyemo was responsible for coordinating the policymaking process related to international finance, trade and investment, energy, and environmental issues. He also served as President Obama’s representative to the G7 and G20.

Adeyemo also served as the first Chief of Staff of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which was founded after the financial crisis to protect Americans from unfair, deceptive, or abusive consumer financial practices. Adeyemo helped build out the Bureau’s initial executive leadership team and served as a member of its executive committee.

After leaving government in 2017, Adeyemo served as the first president of the Obama Foundation, where he worked with the former president and first lady to help them continue giving back to the country as private citizens. Adeyemo also served as a Senior Advisor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and at BlackRock.

Adeyemo was previously a member of the Aspen Strategy Group, which promotes widespread economic opportunity and the competitiveness of America. He also served on the boards of Demos, a New York-based think tank focused on social, political, and economic equity issues; the Golden State Opportunity Foundation, which works to provide financial security to low-income working people throughout California; and Just Homes, a faith-based affordable housing initiative based in Washington, DC.

Born in Idaban, Nigeria, Adeyemo immigrated to California’s Inland Empire as young child with his parents, an educator and a nurse. He attended the University of California, Berkeley and Yale Law School.

History

Wally Adeyemo was named as "African American Outreach" for John Kerry's presidential campaign in 2004.

'Right Wing' Threats Terrorize IRS

Wally Adeyemo retweets article claiming the "right wing" is threatening the IRS.

The Internal Revenue Service leadership claimed that they were victims of "Right Wing Threats" after Americans pushed back on a massive infusion of taxpayer funding for the Internal Revenue Service to hire 87,000 more agents. Democrats deny that massive taxpayer money approved in the Inflation Reduction Act for the Internal Revenue Service would be used to target citizens making less than $400k per year. However, Democrats voted down an amendment on a party-line vote that would have banned the IRS from using the Inflation Reduction Act funds from being used to target middle-class Americans.

Wally Adeyemo retweeted an article by Jacob Bogage at the Washington Post titled "IRS launches safety review after right-wing threats"

"The Internal Revenue Service will launch a full security review of its facilities nationwide, Commissioner Charles Rettig announced Tuesday, as congressional Republicans and far-right extremists are lashing out at the agency and the new funding it is slated to receive in a massive spending law.

“We see what’s out there in terms of social media. Our workforce is concerned about their safety,” Rettig told The Washington Post in an interview. “The comments being made are extremely disrespectful to the agency, to the employees and to the country.”

In a letter to employees sent Tuesday, he wrote that the agency would conduct risk assessments for each of the IRS’s 600 facilities and evaluate whether to increase security patrols along building exteriors, boost designations for restricted areas, examine security around entrances and assess exterior lighting. It will be the agency’s first such review since the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995, which killed 168 people.

“For me this is personal,” Rettig wrote in the letter, which was obtained by The Post. “I’ll continue to make every effort to dispel any lingering misperceptions about our work. And I will continue to advocate for your safety in every venue where I have an audience. You go above and beyond every single day, and I am honored to work with each of you.”

The IRS is set to receive $80 billion in fresh funding over 10 years as part of President Biden’s landmark Inflation Reduction Act. The money is designed to help the agency increase scrutiny of tax cheats and increase enforcement on high-income earners and major corporations, including a large hiring push to help the IRS make up for more than a decade of underfunding.

But Republicans have seized on the funding for the tax collector to attack the law, which also includes funding to address the climate crisis and lower health-care costs. GOP members of Congress have falsely claimed that many of the agency’s 87,000 new hires will be armed and that the new enforcement steps will be aimed at low- and middle-income taxpayers and small businesses.

Many Republicans have drawn baseless comparisons between the IRS’s new enforcement funding and the FBI’s search of former president Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Fla.

“They have 80,000 employees. You know what the IRS also has? 4,600 guns. 5 million rounds of ammunition. Why? Democrats want to double its already massive size,” House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy (Calif.) said on the House floor this month, days after the FBI search.

“With this new power, the IRS will snoop around in your bank account, your Venmo, your small business. Then the government will shake you down for every last cent,” he added. “In light of [the FBI’s search of Trump’s residence], let me ask: Do you really trust this administration’s IRS to be fair, to not abuse their power?”

“Think about it: If the left will weaponize the FBI to raid President Trump’s personal residence, they will surely weaponize the IRS’s new 87,000 agents, many of whom will be trained in the use of deadly force, to go after any American citizen,” Rep. Andrew S. Clyde (R-Ga.) said this month on the House floor.

Overseeing Inflation Reduction Act Provisions

From the New York Times:

A day after President Biden signed into law a sweeping climate, health and tax bill that included $80 billion in funding for the Internal Revenue Service, Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen directed her agency to develop an operational plan for deploying the funds, kick-starting an overhaul of the beleaguered tax collector.

In a memo to the I.R.S. commissioner, Charles P. Rettig, Ms. Yellen mapped out her top priorities, including clearing a backlog of unprocessed tax returns, improving taxpayer services, revamping antiquated technology and hiring thousands of new employees.

The new law, known as the Inflation Reduction Act, “provides the I.R.S. what it has needed for years — a stable stream of mandatory funding that will allow the agency to serve American taxpayers the way they deserve and to enforce the tax laws against high-net-worth individuals, large corporations and complex partnerships who today pay far less than they owe,” Ms. Yellen wrote in the memo, which was viewed by The New York Times.

The money will be used to hire new tax enforcement agents, expand depleted taxpayer-services teams (which leave most customer service calls unanswered) and upgrade outdated technology systems. The $80 billion over a decade will be a substantial infusion for an agency that had a budget of $13.7 billion in 2021.

Ms. Yellen directed the agency to draft the plans within six months, and she tapped her deputy, Wally Adeyemo, to work with Mr. Rettig to develop the new initiatives and timelines. The plan must have metrics for its various areas of improvement so that Congress can hold the agency accountable.