Organizing Treasury

Slate columnist Daniel Gross has an interesting column today on why he thinks Timothy Geithner, who currently leads the New York Federal Reserve, will do well as Secretary of the Treasury. Among his arguments?

Geithner has been an extremely effective meritocratic bureaucrat for 20 yearsâ€"a sort of community organizer for the financial world.

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While Obama abandoned community organizing for politics early on, Geither has stuck with it. Of course, the community Geithner has been trying to organizeâ€"with limited successâ€"is the international and domestic financial community.

Geithner worked his way up the ladder in the Treasury Department. As a junior member of the Committee To Save the World in the 1990s, he worked long nights alongside Treasury Secretaries Robert Rubin and Summers to douse the economic forest fires that arose in Mexico, Asia, and Russia. After a brief sojourn at the International Monetary Fund, in 2003 he was an unexpected choice for president of the New York Federal Reserve.

The community organizing metaphor is an interesting one, both because the term became an (unjustly) hot-potato during the presidential campaign season, and because one of the things organizers try to do is build new institutions. Whether they're short-term institutions, like a group of people on a block who want to drive out a drug-dealer, or long-term institutions, like city-wide coalitions of churches and unions who push for larger social change. They also want to build leaders. A great community organizer may, at some point, make himself obselete.

While Geither certainly doesn't want to organize himself out of business, one of his most important tasks will be to really build a new institution to oversee the bailout, once that actually takes shape. That process hasn't really gotten underway because Treasury has kept switching to new modesl for the bailout, and as a result, the department hasn't really started hiring new civilian staff. That will have to be one of the first thing Geithner deals with, and it'll require getting Treasury's hiring and onboarding processes in gear. In other words, he'll have to spend a lot of time on people issues, much like organizers do.