David Lebryk MPA 1988—and a 1983 graduate of Harvard College—served more than 35 years in the U.S. Department of the Treasury. For over a decade, he served as fiscal assistant secretary, the department’s most senior career position, and briefly served as acting secretary in 2025.
As fiscal assistant secretary, he was responsible for some of the most important functions of government—financing of government operations, making of payments, collection of receipts, making the government’s cash and accounting and reporting of government-wide financial activity.
Lebryk returned to Harvard Kennedy this year as a Hauser Leader at the Center for Public Leadership. Hauser Leaders are senior practitioners who advise and teach students and engage with faculty during their time on campus. He led a study group, “Civil Service in a Rapidly World: How Can Public Servants Meet the Moment?”
We spoke to Lebryk about what has sustained his commitment to public service, the skills needed for leadership, and the role of the Kennedy School.
Q: Your career at the Treasury Department has spanned more than thirty-five years and six administrations. What has kept you so committed to public service?
In many ways, your worldview is influenced deeply by your background. It certainly shaped mine and a reason why I’ve had a lifelong commitment to public service. I grew up in a relatively small town in Indiana of about 25,000. My mother had my brother at nineteen and then my sister and me. She dropped out of college and raised us as a single mother. We relied on public assistance for a period. Ultimately, she went back to school and taught high school English for thirty years.
I’ve been an enormous beneficiary of the safety net and a wonderful education system. It can’t always be about government—nor should it—but government can make a difference. I was, and continue to be, deeply committed to making government works better for people.
After I graduated from the Kennedy School, I joined the government as a Presidential Management Intern (PMI). I spent my first year at the Department of Health and Human Services, before serving the next 35 years at the Department of Treasury. I ended up at Treasury because a classmate from the Kennedy School recommended me to a senior official in the secretary’s office.
When I was considering whether to accept the position at Treasury, I asked my mom for advice. She said, “Absolutely, you should go to Treasury because that’s where all the really important work gets done.” And the English teacher from Valparaiso, Indiana, was right.
Little did I know at the time, but my career would look a lot like a 35-year PMI program, moving from one interesting position to another, working on some of the most important issues of the day with some of the most influential public figures of the past 35 years in a way I could have never anticipated or replicated in any other career.
Q: How do you define principled and effective leadership in practice?
One of the things that attracted me to coming back at the Center for Public Leadership is its mission to develop principled and effective public leaders who will make positive change in the world. That resonates very much with me.
With respect to leadership, character and competence are essential. When both characteristics are present, the result is trust and an organization and a leader can get a lot done when there is trust.
I led an effort to consolidate two bureaus and was given the opportunity to shape the new organizations core values. Integrity was the first value, followed by learning, accountability, collaboration, and excellence. A commitment to these values—integrity in particular—served me well throughout my career.
“People should be committed to making society work better, and if given a chance at any time in their career, they should serve, if not today, then sometime in the future.”
Q: The Treasury Department oversees some of the most critical operations of government in terms of financing payments and financial reporting. What is needed to manage an organization of such complexity and scale?
I’m leading a study group this semester that explores the role of the civil servant and how to navigate the often-complex dynamic between civil servants and political appointees. Having served in six administrations and under twelve secretaries, I have fair amount of experience in this area. I have seen new administrations enter office with ambitious policy agendas but often without understanding how to turn policy into practice. Furthermore, they inherit an existing bureaucracy consisting of people, systems, rules and regulations they don’t understand or know how to manage effectively. I’d developed a good understanding of these things and was able to help political leadership effectively navigate the complexities.
For much of my career when serving in policy roles, my job was to provide the best available advice to political appointees to achieve an outcome. My experience and expertise were valuable, but I knew that the ultimate decision making rested with the senior political officials.
However, when I was running large-scale operations, I was a decision maker and, as a senior leader, I had to set the strategic direction and priorities of the organization. I also had to focus on the operations—our ability to execute our mission. Perhaps most importantly, I had to focus relentlessly on the people—selecting the best people, developing them, rewarding them, and establishing the right environment for success. If you’re an effective leader, all three of those factors along with character and integrity will come together to form a well-led, effective organization.
When you go back to 1789 and the foundation of Treasury, the core functions were financing the government, making payments, collecting receipts, and reporting on government-wide activity. There’s a reason why the role of the fiscal assistant secretary is a career-reserved position. You want someone who can take a long view and think deeply about operational excellence and what it means to run these mission critical functions of government.
While our work might not have been well known to much of the public, that doesn't mean it wasn’t exceptionally important. It’s not an exaggeration to say the world economy doesn’t work without these functions because of the role that government payments, financing, and government securities play in world markets.
Q: Treasury played a crucial role in the COVID-19 pandemic. Can you tell me about that time?
It’s probably one of the most significant and impactful periods of my career. It’s easy to forget what a catastrophic set of circumstances we were facing in the onset of COVID. The unemployment rolls were soaring. Worldwide GDP was contracting. The economic impact payments were essential in stimulating the economy and making sure that people had enough money to pay for essentials like food and shelter.
I have a vivid memory of Secretary Steven Mnuchin walking into the secretary’s conference room and saying to me, “You’re in charge of getting these payments out in ten days.” We had never done anything close to that. But partnering with the IRS and the Bureau of the Fiscal Service, we were able to issue 80 million payments within ten days after the president signed the bill and issue a total of 163 million payments over a five-week period. The last time we had done something similar, we issued the first payments five weeks after the legislation was enacted.
By the second round, we were able to get the majority of the more than 160 million payments out within a day of the president signing the bill. Remarkably virtually everyone who received one of those payments didn’t have to do anything. It just showed up in their mailbox or bank account. That was an example of government functioning at a very high level. In the third round, we were responsible for getting child tax credit payments out, which reduced the nationwide poverty rate by up to 50% by some estimates.
Q: What impact did HKS have on your career?
It has been so much fun to come back as a Hauser Leader. I recently sat in on a session where one of my former professors, Dutch Leonard, was giving a presentation. He talked about organization silos and explained that silos can be “cylinders of excellence.” I reflected on my career and thought about this in the context of our payment operations, which we are exceptionally good at. But working in cylinders doesn’t often lead to good cross organization thinking, collaboration, or innovation. I chuckled and thought Dutch taught me how to look at things differently at the Kennedy School years ago, and he’s still able to teach me something today.
I also look at people like Professor Steve Kelman, who taught me when I was at the Kennedy School. He had enormous influence in giving me an appreciation of what it meant to think about the organization, to drive change, and the importance of actual implementation. You can have the greatest vision, but unless you have the capability to execute that vision, you aren’t getting anywhere. It is one reason why a capable civil service is so very important.
Q: What are you enjoying about being back on campus?
I am impressed by the richness of the Kennedy School’s offerings, both inside and outside the classroom. The extra sessions posted in the HKS daily bulletin are amazing and almost overwhelming. As a Hauser Leader, I’ve also been able to attend many of these sessions, meet with students, and sit in a MPP core course, “Policy Design, and Delivery,” that Professor Anthony Foxx, former secretary of transportation, is teaching. He recently did a session on school desegregation in Charlotte, North Carolina. He led a masterful discussion covering a very complex set of issues. The students, who have uniformly impressed me, discussed the issues analytically, but also in a very humanistic way. It was quite remarkable and enormously powerful. It gave me a lot of faith in the future of public service and the ability of Kennedy School graduates to make a difference in the world.
Q: What advice would you give current HKS students or new alumni entering public service today?
I came across Derek Bok’s commencement speech from 1988, the year I graduated. At the end of my study group, I handed the speech out, and I said, “This should be required reading for any Kennedy School student.”
In the speech, President Bok spoke about the important role that universities and the schools of public administration need to play in developing future leaders to take on big problems. And how we need to encourage the next generation of leaders to be public spirited and engaged in tackling the big challenges. While I don’t imagine that many of the graduates seated in Tercentenary Theatre made abrupt career changing decisions based on his remarks, I do think he said something of lasting importance. People should be committed to making society work better, and if given a chance at any time in their career, they should serve, if not today, then sometime in the future.
Perhaps as true now as anytime, there is a need for people willing and able to make a difference.
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Banner photograph by Bill O’Leary/The Washington Post/Getty Image; inline image courtesy of David Lebryk