Wally Adeyemo served as the 15th deputy secretary of the US Department of the Treasury and chief operating officer of the agency during the Biden administration. He led the department’s national security and economic inequality work, and implemented some of its top policy priorities.
Adeyemo oversaw the department's use of financial sanctions and the work of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States. He led the department's review of the effectiveness of sanctions as a national security tool and was the primary driver of the administration’s approach to considering the national security implications of foreign direct investment. He also managed Treasury’s implementation of the Inflation Reduction Act and the most significant effort in decades to modernize the Internal Revenue Service.
Prior to his appointment, Adeyemo served as president of the Barack Obama Foundation and, in the Obama administration, as deputy national security adviser for international economics and deputy director of the National Economic Council at the White House.
Adeyemo is a distinguished fellow at Columbia University’s Institute for Global Politics and Center for Global Energy Policy. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Aspen Economic Strategy Group. He was previously a board member of Demos, a New York-based think tank focused on social, political, and economic equity issues, and a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and at Blackrock.