Vice Chair of Treasury Dept’s New Racial Equity Committee Wants to Defund Police, ‘Center Race’ in All Policy

The vice chair of the Treasury Department’s newly-announced racial equity committee wants to defund the police and put racial justice at the center of all government policymaking.

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen on Tuesday announced the formation of a 25-member committee called the Treasury Advisory Committee on Racial Equity, which will identify, monitor, and review aspects of the domestic economy “that have directly and indirectly resulted in unfavorable conditions for communities of color,” according to a press release.

In the latest iteration of the Biden administration’s inclusion of capitalism critics in federal governance, Felicia Wong, the president and CEO of the Roosevelt Institute, was announced to serve as the nascent racial equity committee’s vice chair.

Wong is a former executive at the Democracy Alliance, a network of liberal megadonors founded in part by billionaire George Soros. Since 2012, she has led the Roosevelt Institute, a liberal think tank that wants to abolish for-profit prisons, reimagine capitalism, and put racial justice at the “center” of all government policymaking.

Last year, the Roosevelt Institute published a report co-authored by Wong, titled, “A New Paradigm for Justice and Democracy,” which argued that “all policy, from vaccine distribution to higher education funding to tax reform, will have racialized effects. Recognizing this reality, and always considering race in policy design, is therefore vital.”

Wong and the authors wrote that a “skills-based, opportunity-focused liberalism” is outdated and ignores systemic racism, and that “our mainstream politics has yet to recognize, prioritize, and make central the reckoning, race equity, and self-determination that a multiracial democracy would require.”

The report praised the idea of wealth redistribution in the name of racial justice and argued that “equity” means equal outcomes, not equal opportunities.

“True equity means equity of outcome, and not accepting the promise of ‘opportunity’ within a system that continues to systematically exclude,” Wong wrote. “It demands redistribution of resources—especially when wealth for some has been extracted from many—and a redistribution of decision-making power.”

The same report co-authored by Wong also called for eliminating the filibuster, which requires 60 votes in the Senate to pass major legislation, calling it a tool of white supremacy.

“In this environment, a focus on democracy and racial justice means that filibuster reform or elimination must be on the table,” it read. “The filibuster has been disproportionately used throughout history by segregationists and other white supremacists to slow or stop laws intended to promote racial equity. Today, it continues to stall progress on key democracy priorities: protecting voting rights; ending partisan gerrymandering; curbing the influence of corporate money and lobbying in our rulemaking process; and creating stronger ethics laws for federal officeholders.”

“These all have racial justice implications, since the current system prioritizes a lobbying and corporate interest–driven system that is dominated by those who are wealthy and white, and whose interest is in preserving the status quo,” it continued.

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In 2016, years before the “Defund the Police” movement came to national prominence, Wong co-authored a report that argued that “police budgets should be reduced and for-profit prison systems must be done away with.”

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The report also claimed there is a need for “more direct redistribution in the form of investments in asset-poor communities and transfers to asset-poor individuals,” and it argued in favor of a “constitutional amendment guaranteeing the right to vote for all and implementing a fully national system of universal voter registration, which should no longer be left up to states.”

Wong and the other authors also called for a “significant shift in the current state of constitutional jurisprudence on issues of racial inequality, discrimination, and affirmative action” in regard to the Equal Protection Clause.

“[C]urrent Supreme Court practice poses a problem, as it is focused predominantly on race neutrality,” the report said. “Current constitutional doctrine thus makes impossible the kind of racially targeted policies that, as this report has suggested, are essential for undoing structural racial inequities.”

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