United States Department of the Treasury

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  On the 22nd of June 1775, just days after the Battle of Bunker Hill, a group of delegates gathered in Philadelphia and made a decision that would shape the financial life of a nation not yet born. The Continental Congress issued two million dollars in paper bills, backed not by gold or silver, but by faith in a revolutionary cause. Twenty-eight citizens of Philadelphia were hired to sign and number each note by hand.

  That act of financial improvisation was the first chapter of what would become one of the most consequential institutions in American history: the United States Department of the Treasury. What began as a desperate measure to fund a war grew into a department that now touches nearly every corner of American economic life, from the coins in your pocket to the tax returns filed each spring. How did a committee of five colonial delegates become the machinery behind a sixteen-and-a-half-billion-dollar annual operation? And who were the people, famous and forgotten, who built it?

• 2. A Revolution on Paper

  ›

  George Clymer and Michael Hillegas received an unusual assignment on the 29th of July 1775. The Second Continental Congress handed the two men joint responsibility for administering the finances of a government that was still fighting for its right to exist. The colonies had no power to levy taxes. Foreign investors were skeptical. The only tool available was paper.

  The paper bills issued that summer devalued rapidly as the war dragged on. By May 1781, the Continental dollar had collapsed to a rate of somewhere between 500 and 1000 to 1 against hard currency. Protests spread across the colonies, and a new phrase entered the American vernacular: "not worth a Continental." Hillegas, who had first been called Treasurer of the United States on the 14th of May 1777, presided over a treasury that was reorganized three times between 1778 and 1781 as Congress scrambled to stabilize its books. The total paper currency in circulation reached two hundred and forty-one and a half million dollars before it became nearly worthless.

  With the signing of the Declaration of Independence on the 4th of July 1776, the new republic gained standing as a sovereign nation and was finally able to seek loans from abroad. That shift from paper promises to international credit marked the first real turning point in American financial history.

• 3. Robert Morris and the Financier

  ›

  Robert Morris stepped into the wreckage in 1781, designated Superintendent of Finance at a moment when the confederation's books were in disarray. A wealthy colonial merchant, Morris had earned the nickname "the financier" for his ability to procure funds or goods on short notice. His staff included a comptroller, a treasurer, a register, and auditors, and together they managed the country's accounts through 1784.

  Morris resigned that year because of ill health, leaving a treasury board of three commissioners to oversee the finances of the former colonies until September 1789. His tenure had restored a measure of stability after the Continental currency collapse, but the underlying problem remained: the new nation had no permanent, well-organized institution for financial administration.

  When the First United States Congress convened in New York City on the 4th of March 1789, marking the beginning of government under the U.S. Constitution, solving that problem was among its first orders of business. On the 2nd of September 1789, Congress enacted legislation creating a permanent Department of Treasury, specifying by name each of its founding officers: a Secretary, a Comptroller, an Auditor, a Treasurer, a Register, and an Assistant to the Secretary.

• 4. Hamilton's Blueprint

  ›

  Alexander Hamilton took the oath of office on the 11th of September 1789, nine days after the department was created by law. He had served as George Washington's aide-de-camp during the Revolutionary War and had been instrumental in ratifying the Constitution. Washington's first choice for the job had been Robert Morris of Pennsylvania, the same man who had steadied the finances in 1781, but Morris declined the appointment and recommended Hamilton instead.

  Hamilton's first official act was to submit a report to Congress laying the foundation for the nation's financial health. His position on the country's seventy-five million dollar war debt surprised many legislators. He insisted on full, dollar-for-dollar federal repayment, and he argued the case directly: "the debt of the United States was the price of liberty. The faith of America has been repeatedly pledged for it, and with solemnities that give peculiar force to the obligation." He also proposed that government revenues be grounded in customs duties, foreseeing the development of American industry and trade.

  Hamilton's sound financial policies helped attract investment in the Bank of the United States, which served as the government's fiscal agent. Today his portrait appears on the obverse of the ten-dollar bill, while the Treasury Building in Washington, D.C. is depicted on the reverse. The department's seal, closely resembling other works by Francis Hopkinson, the treasurer of loans, was likely designed by Hopkinson, who submitted bills to Congress in 1780 to authorize the design of several departmental seals.

• 5. Sophia Holmes and the Early Women

  ›

  In 1861, a senator and several colleagues advocated for the hiring of a woman named Sophia Holmes as a janitor under Secretary of the Treasury Francis Spinner. Holmes became the first Black woman employed by the Treasury Department and, by extension, by the entire federal government. Her salary was fifteen dollars per month.

  The following year, Holmes discovered a box filled with U.S. currency, including a number of thousand-dollar bills, and reported it to Secretary Spinner. The find prevented a theft of more than two hundred thousand dollars from the department. President Abraham Lincoln honored her with a commendation, and the federal government appointed her for life as a messenger with its department of Issues.

  Also in 1862, Jennie Douglas joined the department, recruited by Spinner as well. Douglas is sometimes credited with being the first woman to hold an appointed position in the federal government, a distinction that sits in some tension with the earlier hiring of Holmes. Both women arrived at the department during one of the most turbulent periods in American history, when the government itself was funding a civil war, and their presence quietly broadened who counted as a federal employee.

• 6. Reorganization and the 2020 Breach

  ›

  The September 11 attacks triggered the most significant structural reshaping of the Treasury Department in its modern history. Effective the 24th of January 2003, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, which had been a Treasury bureau since 1972, was reorganized under the Homeland Security Act of 2002. Its law enforcement functions, including regulation of firearms and explosives traffic, moved to the Department of Justice as the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives. Treasury retained the regulatory and tax collection functions related to alcohol and tobacco in a new body called the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau.

  Effective the 1st of March 2003, the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center, the U.S. Customs Service, and the U.S. Secret Service all transferred to the newly created Department of Homeland Security. The department that emerged from those changes was leaner in law enforcement capacity but no less complex in its financial mandate.

  In 2020, Treasury suffered a data breach in what was likely a cyberattack by a nation-state adversary, with Russia cited as a possibility. That breach was the first detected instance of a much wider attack on the federal government, which ultimately involved at least eight federal departments. The incident underlined that a department founded to manage currency and debt now holds data that adversaries treat as a strategic target.

• 7. Scale and Scope Today

  ›

  The Treasury Department's authorized budget for Fiscal Year 2024 stands at sixteen and a half billion dollars. The Internal Revenue Service alone accounts for more than twelve billion of that total, a figure that reflects just how central tax administration is to the department's daily work. International programs receive just over two billion dollars, while the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, which coordinates global cooperation against financial crime, operates on one hundred and ninety million.

  The department is organized into two major components: departmental offices, which handle policy and overall management, and operating bureaus, which carry out specific functions. Among those bureaus, the Bureau of Engraving and Printing designs and manufactures U.S. currency and official certificates, while the U.S. Mint designs and manufactures coins, maintains custody of the nation's silver and gold assets, and distributes coins to Federal Reserve banks. The Community Development Financial Institution Fund, one of the less visible bureaus, was created specifically to expand access to credit and investment capital in distressed urban and rural communities.

  From 1830 until 1901, the department also oversaw weights and measures through its Office of Standard Weights and Measures, a responsibility later transferred to the agency that eventually became the National Institute of Standards and Technology. The breadth of that historical mandate is a reminder that Treasury's reach has always extended beyond the obvious.