Treasury Department Counselor Natasha Sarin to Join Yale Law and Management School as Professor
- The Indian American is a protege of former treasury secretary and current Harvard professor Larry Summers, with whom she has written several papers and articles.
Natasha Sarin is leaving the Treasury Department, where she served as a counselor for Tax Policy and Implementation, Politico reports. The young Indian American is heading to Yale Law School and the Yale School of Management, where she’ll teach.
Sarin’s work has focused on financial regulation and tax policy. She is considered to be a protege of former treasury secretary and current Harvard professor Larry Summers, with whom she has written several papers and articles. Along with Summers, she has “led efforts to get more funding for the IRS and stayed to help oversee implementation of the tax elements of the Inflation Reduction Act,” as reported by Politico.
Sarin teamed up with Summers after completing her Ph.D. “on a project studying the tax gap and looked into ways those funds could be recouped,” The New York Times said in a 2021 profile on Sarin.
When Sarin was appointed to the Treasury Department in March 2021, The New York Times reported at the time that it was “viewed by many as a testament to how important tax code compliance is to the administration.” But at the same time, The Times noted that her appointment “also raised questions about the progressiveness of Biden’s agenda given her previous writings and her ties to Lawrence H. Summers, who has become a vocal critic of the president’s spending plans, warning they would fuel rapid inflation that could get out of control.”
The daughter of a finance professor, Sarin grew up in Northern California, and was captain of her varsity basketball team, The Times said. She showed an interest in policy at a young age.
As a Yale undergraduate, she landed a summer internship in 2010 at the White House National Economic Council, where she met Summers, who was the director. He encouraged her to join the doctorate program in economics at Harvard and ultimately hired her as a teaching and research assistant “She’s never interested in the math problem just as a math problem. She’s interested in how it drives toward a solution that will contribute to the best policy,” Summers told The Times.
Before joining public service, Sarin was an assistant professor of law at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School. She joined the Law School in the fall of 2018 with a secondary appointment in the Finance Department at the Wharton School. She earned a JD and Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University. She also received a BA in Ethics, Politics, and Economics from Yale University.