The Functional Bureaucracies of the U.S. Treasury

The Treasury Department’s bureaucracies pay the government’s bills and manage its debt. They also include the top bank regulator and the key institution that enforces U.S. financial sanctions abroad.

U.S. Treasury Department building in Washington, D.C. Source.

The Department of the Treasury is the executive department which manages the finances of the U.S. federal government. The Treasury Department creates, sells, and repays the $24 trillion of United States Treasury securities, the government debts which fund the federal government, and whose sales determine interest rates worldwide. The Treasury is one of the preeminent U.S. banking regulators through the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), which “oversees about 1200 banks with combined assets of about $14 trillion, some two-thirds of the total in the U.S. banking system.”¹ While the Treasury’s bureaus administer the government’s most critical operations, its offices oversee the continuation of politics by financial means both domestically and abroad, especially through the use of financial sanctions on foreign individuals and organizations.