(Bloomberg) -- Derek Kaufman, a former global head of fixed-income trading at hedge fund Citadel, is starting an effort to try to break through the divisiveness in US politics.
His group, called the Inclusive Abundance Initiative, will seek to bring together policy experts, business leaders and government officials who are politically moderate to further policies that focus on topics such as energy, housing and technological innovation. The initiative is set to begin this month, a few weeks before the US election in November.
“There’s a huge cohort of people from the center right through the center left who are excited about those ideas,” Kaufman said in an interview. “When you get them in a room and talk about ideas and not about the divisive things, the temperature is much cooler. It’s normal.”
Kaufman, 50, describes his group as a network of “passionate pragmatists” that includes R Street Institute, a free-markets think tank, ClearPath, a conservative group that advocates for clean energy, and Breakthrough Institute, which focuses on the environment.
Besides promoting efficiency in government, Kaufman said his network will work on issues that have become more acute since the pandemic, such as underfunding in housing and all the red tape that has slowed energy being added to electricity grids. His nonprofit will encourage policymakers to embrace processes and values from across the political spectrum to meet their own goals, he said.
“It would be great if Democrats embrace some conservative ideas such as deregulation to achieve their objectives,” he said. “And it would be great if Republicans adopted some progressive ideas such as the child tax credit.”
Kaufman added that he was happy to see that both Vice President Kamala Harris and JD Vance, Donald Trump’s running mate, have raised the issue of child tax credits for families. It has been a focus for Kaufman since he left Wall Street about a decade ago to get involved in policymaking.
He was involved in the Child Tax Credit in the American Rescue Plan. He’s also worked on a program that’s part of the CHIPS and Science Act, which seeks to spur tech innovation beyond Silicon Valley to underserved areas in the country.
The goal is “to bring the model to lots of other people and scale it,” Kaufman said.
Over the past year, he has assembled a network of experts from groups including the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, as well as the Upjohn Institute for Employment Research that focuses on regional economies and labor markets. Kaufman said his staff has already met with congressional members and funded research for housing bills introduced by Republican and Democratic senators.
One is the Yes in My Backyard Act, or YIMBY, which focuses on expanding zoning to help bolster homebuilding, while the other seeks to reduce regulations.
Inclusive Abundance will try to encourage wealthy people to use their clout to further policymaking — something Kaufman dubs “policy philanthropy.” For instance, philanthropists could push to improve government food programs to help alleviate child hunger rather than just donate to food banks, he said.
Kaufman, who declined to name his funders, bemoaned how political discourse in the US has deteriorated so much that people now refer to the opposing party and its supporters as the enemy.
“This isn’t the way our society should function,” he said. “There’s so much more people have in common.”
Kaufman left Citadel in 2015 after his group lost about $1 billion from a variety of trades. He said he’s proud that the management team he put in place has remained with the fund for the past nine years.
Before joining Citadel, Kaufman was global head of fixed income at JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s proprietary trading group. He also previously served as a member of the Treasury Borrowing Advisory Committee and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s investor committee on financial markets.
Kaufman said he left the industry after feeling that he achieved what he had set out to do. Kaufman is on the leadership council of the Robin Hood Foundation, an anti-poverty charity that’s popular on Wall Street.
(Adds comment from Kaufman in ninth paragraph. An earlier version was corrected.)
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