Senate taxwriters unanimously back Tellez for Treasury legislative affairs post

The Senate Finance Committee voted 27-0 on March 6 to recommend that the full chamber approve President Biden’s nomination of Corey Tellez to serve as Treasury assistant secretary for legislative affairs.

Tellez, who currently is acting assistant secretary for legislative affairs, joined the Treasury Department in 2022 after spending 16 years in various staff positions in the House and Senate. She holds a Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and a Juris Doctor from the University of Illinois College of Law.

Tellez got a generally favorable reception from Finance Committee members during a January 31 hearing to consider her nomination, although ranking member Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, pressed her on certain institutional concerns he has with the Treasury Department and the Internal Revenue Service under the Biden administration.

Specifically, Crapo criticized Treasury and IRS leaders for being slow to respond to requests for information from the committee and from his own office. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, he said, took almost seven months to provide Finance Committee members with answers to questions for the record after a hearing last year on the Treasury Department’s budget for fiscal year 2024, and IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel took eight months to provide written responses to questions from the panel about the agency’s FY 2024 budget and the tax year 2022 filing season. He noted that other months-old information requests from Senate taxwriters to Treasury and IRS officials remain unanswered.

Tellez responded by pointing to her own experience working on Capitol Hill and telling Crapo that she “deeply respect[s] the role that Congress plays in policymaking” and “understand[s] the importance of providing timely and accurate answers” to questions from lawmakers. (She stated in a separate exchange with Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden, D-Ore., that her career as a congressional staffer cemented her belief in the importance of working with members on both sides of the aisle and with executive branch officials to advance legislative priorities.)

Crapo also faulted the Biden Treasury Department for issuing guidance on certain enacted tax legislation that, in his view, is at odds with the plain language of the statute as approved by Congress—a criticism that some congressional Republicans have leveled most notably against guidance implementing various clean energy provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 (P.L. 117-169). He asked Tellez what she would do “to ensure that all voices are heard” in the rulemaking process and that “the administration’s preferences on regulatory guidance [do] not overstep congressional intent.”

Tellez replied that her role in leading Treasury’s legislative affairs operations would be to see to it that the views of lawmakers and stakeholders “are heard by the department [and] elevated respectfully within the department as [policy] decisions are being made.”

Senate leaders have not yet indicated when Tellez’s nomination will come to the floor.

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