Joseph Torsella

Joseph M. Torsella (born October 8, 1963, in Berwick, Pennsylvania) is an American politician, former diplomat, and public-finance reformer. He graduated from Wyoming Seminary and earned a B.A. in economics and history from the University of Pennsylvania (Phi Beta Kappa, 1986), then studied American history at New College, Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar (1986–1990). He began his public career as Philadelphia's Deputy Mayor for Policy and Planning under Mayor Ed Rendell (1992–1993).

Torsella was the founding president and CEO of the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia (1997–2003, and again 2006–2009), where he raised roughly $185 million and opened the museum in 2003; the Center hosted Barack Obama's March 2008 "A More Perfect Union" race speech during his tenure. He chaired the Pennsylvania State Board of Education (2008–2011) and served as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations for Management and Reform under President Obama (2011–2014), acting as the administration's chief architect and spokesperson for UN reform and the government's lead fiscal watchdog at the UN.

Elected Pennsylvania State Treasurer in 2016 (taking office January 2017), Torsella became the state's chief financial officer, overseeing more than $100 billion in deposits, withdrawals, and investments. He built his reputation as a low-fee, transparency-focused institutional investor — a philosophy he traces to Vanguard founder John C. Bogle, who chaired his board at the Constitution Center. He lost his 2020 reelection bid to Republican Stacy Garrity by a narrow margin.

After leaving office, Governor Tom Wolf reappointed him to the Pennsylvania Public School Employees' Retirement System (PSERS) board in 2021, where he continued as a reform advocate until resigning effective April 1, 2023. He earlier founded 743 Ventures, a business consulting firm, in 2004. He lives in Flourtown, Pennsylvania, with his wife, Carolyn Short Torsella, and their four children.

• Low-fee, index-oriented investing. Torsella is a self-described skeptic of "celebrity stock pickers," having absorbed from John Bogle the lesson that "even the brightest and luckiest investment wizards can't beat the market" over time.
• Fee discipline and conflict-of-interest reform. As Treasurer he banned third-party placement agents/finder's fees on state investment contracts and instituted Treasury's first investment code of conduct.
• Public-fund accountability. He co-authored a bipartisan legislative report estimating Wall Street firms had extracted roughly $5.5 billion in fees from Pennsylvania's pension systems over 30 years, and repeatedly voted against high-fee hedge fund and private-equity contracts at PSERS.
• Savings-access programs. He championed vehicles that put ordinary Pennsylvanians into investment products, including the PA ABLE program (for people with disabilities) and Keystone Scholars (a universal children's savings program).