Two platforms, one argument: public finance is a business question
Natasha Sarin operated on two fronts in late August. On August 31, she published an opinion piece in The New York Times on U.S. Open pricing and access, syndicated to RealClearMarkets and Newser. In the same week, her Budget Lab at Yale released research quantifying the fiscal cost of IRS staffing cuts: audit revenue fell roughly $3.5 billion, a finding covered by NPR, Yahoo Finance, and Moneywise.
The timing illustrates how Sarin works. She writes for a general audience in the Times while her research center produces the kind of data CFOs, tax directors, and boards use to model compliance risk and federal revenue volatility. One byline reaches policymakers and the public; the other gives finance teams a number they can plan around.
From Treasury to the academy, with the toolkit intact
Sarin is a professor of law at Yale Law School with a secondary appointment in the finance department at the Yale School of Management. She is also president and co-founder of the Budget Lab at Yale, a nonpartisan research center whose forecasts of federal policy impacts have become a leading source on tariff data. Before Yale, she served at the United States Treasury Department as deputy assistant secretary for economic policy and later as counselor to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, where her work focused on narrowing the gap between taxes owed and taxes collected.
Her research centers on public finance and financial regulation: tax policy, household finance, insurance, macroprudential risk management. The scholarship has been covered in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Financial Times. She is a Washington Post contributing columnist and a frequent guest on CNBC's Squawk Box.
The $3.5 billion finding and what it signals
The Budget Lab research on IRS enforcement did what good public-finance work should do: it attached a dollar figure to a policy shift. After staffing cuts, audit revenue fell roughly $3.5 billion. That number matters to treasury departments modeling federal revenue trends, to law firms advising on tax controversy, and to boards thinking about the probability of audit in a lower-capacity enforcement environment.
Sarin's Budget Lab has built credibility by producing nonpartisan forecasts that land in earnings calls, investor letters, and congressional testimony. The IRS work continues a pattern: quantify the fiscal effect, publish it where both policy and business audiences will see it, and let the number speak.
The larger portfolio: tariffs, AI, and the next tax era
In her keynotes, Sarin argues that tariffs may end up being the most significant middle-class tax increase in U.S. history, and she unpacks the constitutional, fiscal, and business implications of a $3 trillion revenue shift. She examines why AI investment, with capital expenditures estimated to reach 2 percent of U.S. GDP in 2025, has raced ahead of the rules governing it, and what today's regulatory choices mean for growth.
She speaks and advises on tariffs, tax reform, inflation, fiscal sustainability, IRS and tax administration, Federal Reserve independence, and AI's implications for regulation, economic growth, and the labor market. Audiences leave with data-driven tools to anticipate workforce shifts, plan pricing and investment, and prepare their organizations for the next economic era.
Why senior leaders book Sarin
CHROs modeling workforce exposure to tariff-driven supply-chain shifts need someone who can translate trade policy into hiring and wage planning. CFOs building scenarios around federal revenue volatility want the economist who worked inside Treasury and now runs the lab that produces the forecasts. Boards debating AI governance want the person who can connect capital deployment, labor displacement, and regulatory lag in one conversation.
Sarin delivers the nonpartisan data, the policy context, and the implementation questions that turn a briefing into a planning session.
Natasha Sarin is exclusively represented by Stellant Group for keynotes, board sessions, and confidential advisory work with leadership teams navigating tariffs, tax policy, fiscal volatility, and AI's effects on the labor market and regulatory landscape.
