Volcker Alliance

It also supports expansions of regulatory state power over the financial industry such as the Dodd-Frank Act and other financial services rules, and supported Obamacare as an opportunity to improve healthcare by increasing the government’s role in it. ^{3 4}

The Volcker Alliance is heavily funded by Ray Dalio, founder of Bridgewater Associates, the largest hedge fund in the world. ⁵

History and Leadership

Paul A. Volcker was the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board from 1979 to 1987. ⁶ In 2013, he founded the Volcker Alliance to promote “effective management of government to achieve results that matter to citizens” by making government programs run more effectively. ⁷ Volcker died in December 2019 at the age of 92. ⁸

The former president of the Volcker Alliance is Thomas W. Ross, a former state judge and university president who was ousted as president of the University of North Carolina by UNC’s then-Republican-controlled Board of Governors. ⁹

Ross was the former executive director of the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation, which under his leadership completed its transformation from supporting charitable works in North Carolina to funding left-of-center social and political causes in the state. ¹⁰ Ross was also a leader in the Democratic Party-backed initiative in North Carolina against the Republican-led legislature’s drawing of Congressional districts. ¹¹

Ross retired at the end of 2021. He was succeeded by Sara Mogulescu. She remained president as of 2026. ^{12 13}

Mogulescu had joined the Alliance in 2018 to work as its inaugural executive vice president. Under Mogulescu’s leadership, the Alliance launched several significant programs, including the Next Generation Service Corps, Transformers in the Public Sector, Service to Service, the Constructive Dialogue Curriculum Initiative, and the Accountability and Reform Research Consortium (ARRC). ¹³

She was previously a partner at Bennett Midland, a civil service consulting firm; the director of What Works Cities, an initiative of Bloomberg Philanthropies for civic works; the principal architect of the Safety and Justice Challenge, a $100 million effort by the MacArthur Foundation to spearhead prison reform efforts at the local level, which was launched in partnership with the Volcker Alliance; the designer of Invest Health, a joint initiative of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Reinvestment Fund to reconfigure “health outcomes” in 50 American cities; and was involved in New York City’s Raise the Age Implementation Task Force, a project to help “guide” New York City as it put a new law into practice that required the city to raise the age of criminal accountability from 16 to 18. ¹³

Research and Policy Priorities

Tracking and Expanding the Size of Government

In a 2017 paper entitled, “The True Size of Government” Volcker Alliance senior fellow Paul C. Light enumerated the combination of federal employees, contractors, grant-funded workers, active-duty military, and U.S. Postal Service employees that he contends make up the true “blended workforce” of the federal government. ¹⁴ The report supported the Volcker Alliance viewpoint that a larger federal workforce is better. Light has blamed the inefficiencies of the federal government on understaffing and argued against reducing the size of the federal workforce.

In his report, Light criticized the regulatory policy efforts of President Donald Trump, writing that “his definition of a government that works better and costs less was a government that cost less because it was no longer working.” ¹⁴

Modernizing Agency Hiring Practices

In 2018, President Trump implemented hiring reforms for federal civil servants as part of H.R. 5515, the John S. McCain National Defense Authorization Act. ¹⁵ The reforms, which broadly made it easier for federal agencies to hire white-collar employees, were supported by the Volcker Alliance and Partnership for Public Service.

Increasing the Power of Financial Regulators

In 2016, the Volcker Alliance published a report, “Unfinished Business: Banking in the Shadows” that warned that “the present regulatory framework, with its redundancies and inconsistencies, simply is not up to the challenge” of protecting the American financial system. ¹⁶  Along with the Volcker Alliance’s 2015 report “Reshaping the Financial Regulatory System: Long Awaited, Now Crucial,” it called for a significant restructuring and expansion of the federal government’s financial regulatory agencies. ¹⁷

In 2017, Volcker said that the Financial Stability Oversight Council was “insufficient as a vehicle to overcome the serious flaws in the regulatory architecture” and called for the Trump administration to increase regulations and oversight over the financial industry. ¹⁸

Proposed changes included moving financial regulation enforcement administration from its traditional place at the U.S. Department of the Treasury to an independent entity, such as the Federal Reserve Board. This would remove significant authority and responsibility from the executive branch and the president and increase the power of the U.S. Congress and unelected bureaucrats.  ¹⁹

Government as a Career

The Volcker Alliance works with federal and state agencies to promote government employment to college and post-secondary graduates. ²⁰ Its goals include increasing “university students’ interest in government jobs and understanding of government hiring processes” and “placement of top university graduates in employment in government agencies.” ²¹

State Financial Health

One of the Volcker Alliance’s initiatives is a report that grades states on their financial health and promotes policies that would increase federal support of state budgets. ^{22 23}

The report highlights the financial conditions of many states and local governments across the country that face severe budget structural problems and recommends that the federal government avoid cutting federal budgets that could help alleviate these states’ issues. ²² It promotes federal spending and support as solutions for over-leveraged governments such as Detroit and Illinois. ²⁴

The Volcker Alliance asserts that federal tax cuts contribute to states’ fiscal challenges by reducing federal funding to state programs. ²⁵  It recommends the establishment of a new federal agency to coordinate federal and state spending on programs such as Medicaid. ²⁵

The Volcker Alliance also promotes a proposal by Paul Volcker that the federal government spend $90 billion annually on states’ transportation infrastructure. This spending would largely benefit states with large and poorly controlled budgets such as New York, New Jersey, Illinois, and California. However, the Volcker Alliance also notes that most states and local governments are not disclosing or tracking the deferred costs to maintain and upgrade infrastructure and has awarded failing grades to many states as a result. ²⁶

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI)

Beginning in the early 2020s, the Volcker Alliance expanded its programming to emphasize diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives across public service education and government workforce development. The Alliance launched the “Future Leaders of Schools of Public Service” in 2022, a program coordinated with deans of major public policy schools that refers Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC) colleagues to academic leadership opportunities. It also partnered with the MacArthur Foundation to establish the Safety and Justice Challenge (SJC) Future Leaders Network, offering internships and fellowships aimed at “underrepresented” groups. Additional projects, including the Increasing Diversity in Government initiative and support for Arizona State University’s Next Generation Service Corps, sought to broaden racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic representation in public-sector pipelines. ²⁷

Biden Administration

The Volcker Alliance responded favorably to the Biden administration’s federal workforce policies. In November 2021, the Biden-Harris administration released its first President’s Management Agenda (PMA), which listed strengthening and empowering the federal workforce as its first strategic priority. The Volcker Alliance publicly welcomed the PMA, stating that it was pleased to see the first priority focused on empowering the federal workforce, and calling the priority consistent with the organization’s founding chairman Paul Volcker’s vision. ²⁸

The Biden administration subsequently oversaw a nearly six percent growth in the full-time federal civilian workforce across its four-year term, reversing workforce reductions that had occurred during President Donald Trump‘s first term. ²⁹

The Volcker Alliance also hosted multiple webinar briefings on Biden administration infrastructure proposals, including panels discussing the Biden administration’s American Jobs Plan and the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which Volcker Alliance-affiliated panelists discussed in favorable terms as a substantial investment in state and local infrastructure needs. ^{30 31}

Second Trump Administration

The Volcker Alliance has taken an adversarial posture toward the second Trump administration’s federal workforce policies. In December 2024, before President Trump’s inauguration, the organization hosted a briefing on the incoming administration in which a panelist characterized the plans of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the advisory body led by Elon Musk tasked with reducing the federal workforce and cutting spending, as easy to propose in the abstract but very hard to execute in practice. ³²

In February 2025, a senior Volcker Alliance official published an essay arguing that DOGE’s mass layoffs, executive orders targeting career civil servants, and dismissals of federal employees were deterring qualified candidates from pursuing public service careers and poisoning the federal government’s reputation as an employer. ³³

The Volcker Alliance also launched the Accountability and Reform Research Consortium (ARRC), an initiative awarding stipends to university researchers to study the impact of the second Trump administration’s federal workforce reductions on public services and democratic governance. As of March 2026, the ARRC had awarded six research grants across nine universities to analyze the scale, distribution, and downstream effects of DOGE-era federal layoffs. ³⁴

The Volcker Alliance restated its concerns with the Trump administration’s January 2025 executive order reinstating “Schedule F” or “Schedule Policy/Career,” a policy first issued in Trump’s first term that reclassified certain federal policy-making roles as at-will positions removable without civil service protections. Volcker Alliance first raised its objections in October 2020 when it stated that the original Schedule F order subjected federal employees to a political loyalty test and put in jeopardy institutional expertise amassed over decades. ^{35 36}

Funding

Dalio Philanthropies

The Volcker Alliance’s single largest donor is hedge fund billionaire Ray Dalio, whose Dalio Philanthropies donated $10 million in 2013. ³⁷ In comparison, the Volcker Alliance only reported receiving roughly $12 million from all other donors combined between 2014 and 2017. ³⁸

Federal Government

The Volcker Alliance’s proposal to improve the federal workforce’s skillsets received $300,000 in funding from the General Services Administration.  ³⁹

Peter Peterson Foundation

The Volcker Alliance has received millions in donations from the Peter G. Peterson Foundation. The Peterson Foundation focuses on debt reduction and fiscal responsibility. ⁴⁰. ⁴¹

Carnegie Corporation of New York

The Volcker Alliance has received almost two million dollars⁴² from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, which also supports left of center organizations like ACLU, ACORN, the New Venture Fund, and National Public Radio. ⁴³