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“Personnel is policy,” says a Washington maxim invoked at the dawn of each new administration. The point is valid; you don’t really understand policy until you know who’s creating it and executing it. President Biden’s economic team, still being assembled, reflects the forces shaping today’s Democratic Party. “The staffing really runs the gamut from very centrist Democrats to people who come much more from the left,” says Stan Veuger, a Washington-based economist at the American Enterprise Institute and an economics lecturer at Harvard. In addition to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, here are top power players on Biden’s economic team.

Brian Deese, director of the National Economic Council

Just 42, and not a trained economist, Deese nonetheless held high-level economic posts throughout the Obama administration, including deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget and deputy director of the National Economic Council, which manages the President’s economic decision process. “If you have a strong White House, the person who organizes the meetings, the presentations, and what will be presented to the President has a lot of power,” says the Brookings Institution’s David Wessel. “I think he will be that person.”

Jared Bernstein, member of the Council of Economic Advisers

Bernstein’s power is greater than his title suggests. He won’t outrank other CEA members, but he’s already one of the administration’s most influential figures because of his long and close relationship with Biden. In the Obama administration he was chief economist to then–Vice President Biden. Bernstein is decidedly left of center but not over on the Bernie Sanders fringe.

Rohit Chopra, director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau*

Amped up regulation of the financial services industry looks to be a significant trend in the Biden administration. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has said she thinks the Dodd-Frank law doesn’t go far enough, and Chopra’s record suggests he’ll be an energetic regulator. Attorney Lucy Morris, who served with Chopra at the CFPB in its early days, writes, “I anticipate that he will be at least as aggressive as former director [Richard] Cordray, if not more,” a prospect that may chill the blood of Wall Street executives. Since May 2018 Chopra has been on the Federal Trade Commission. *pending Senate confirmation

Other top power positions haven’t been filled as of this writing, but whoever takes them will play important roles in executing Biden’s economic policies. Two of the most important:

Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust

The Trump Justice Department was more active on antitrust than many would have expected under a Republican President. The Biden administration could be even more active. Candidate Biden said the tech giants wield too much power, a view with bipartisan support. The Trump DOJ last year sued Google on antitrust grounds, joined by 14 states, both red and blue. Biden’s choice of an antitrust chief will signal what’s ahead for Silicon Valley and potentially other industries.

Comptroller of the Currency

A low-profile post, it’s crucially important in the regulation of national banks, including the biggest ones: JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, and Wells Fargo. If increased financial regulation becomes a Biden priority, as many expect, the holder of this job will be highly influential.

As for the policy that the Biden economic team will be executing: At its highest level, it’s driven partly by the circumstances of the moment and partly by shared deep beliefs. The most immediate imperative, managing the pandemic crisis, is more about competence than ideology. “If Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders had become President, they would still have to deal first and foremost with just crisis management,” says Veuger. Beyond the pandemic, the issues at the top of the team’s to-do list are infrastructure, climate, inequality, and raising taxes. Biden and the team will pursue an activist agenda based on their view that today’s ultralow interest rates—negative after inflation—present “a once-in-a-generation opportunity to make huge public investments that will pay off in higher living standards for the next generation,” says Wessel.

That view fits well with a broader, deeper view of how to strengthen the overall economy. Wessel says, “If you got all the economic team of the Biden administration in a room and asked them, ‘Do you think that investments in pre-K education and more aid for young children and low-income families can increase not only their prospects of moving into the middle class, but can also increase the productivity growth of the United States?’ I think they would say yes.”

Having hit the trifecta of controlling the White House plus both houses of Congress, Biden, his team, and their party now have a rare opportunity to test that belief.

In one key area—dealing with China—Biden has signaled he's in no rush to depart from the Trump administration policies.

Orders to rescind Trump tariffs on $350 billion worth of Chinese imports are conspicuously absent from Biden's ten-day policy blitz. Nor has Biden suggested any immediate interest in overturning Trump administration actions to delist Chinese telecommunications companies on the New York Stock Exchange, or ban Chinese apps, or blacklist Chinese technology companies.

Biden's aides have said that, for many problems involving China, the incoming president plans to take a multilateral approach by enlisting the support of Western allies to maximize U.S. leverage on Beijing. That would be a clear departure from Trump's "America First" style.

But building that consensus will take time. And in recent days, as Biden has announced his picks for cabinet positions and senior policy advisers, it has been almost impossible to distinguish his new team's China rhetoric from that of the departing Trump officials.

Yellen also accused China of "erecting trade barriers and giving illegal subsidies to corporations" and "stealing intellectual property," and faulted its inadequate "labor and environmental standards." And while she didn't specifically accuse China of currency manipulation, the former Federal Reserve chair promised to "oppose any and all attempts by foreign countries to artificially manipulate currency values to gain advantage in trade."

Other Biden appointments underscore the new president's willingness to emulate Trump's confrontational approach to China. Biden has picked former Obama state department official Kurt Campbell to take on a newly created role within his National Security Council as "Indo-Pacific coordinator." Campbell was the architect of the Obama administration's 2012 "pivot to Asia" strategy, which called for taking a tough line on China while bolstering U.S. military resources and diplomatic relationships in the rest of the region.

In a 2018 essay entitled "The China Reckoning" and co-authored with former Biden aide Ely Ratner, Campbell argued that Trump was right to decry America's four-decades-long policy of engagement with China as a failure.

Former Trump officials also have hailed Biden's choice of Katherine Tai to lead the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative. Tai, a native Mandarin speaker whose parents immigrated to the U.S. from Taiwan, served as America's chief enforcement lawyer for China during the Obama Administration and has been chief trade counsel on the House Ways and Means Committee since 2017. She has been described by trade experts on both sides of the partisan aisle as a negotiator whose views on Chinese trade practices match those of outgoing trade czar Robert Lighthizer, one of Trump's most vehement trade hawks.

Whether Beijing will find it easier to engage with Biden's China hawks than Trump's China hawks remains unclear.

Blackstone Group chairman Stephen Schwarzman, speaking before a financial forum in Hong Kong Tuesday, predicted the new U.S. administration would take a “softer tone” towards China, and that he expects tensions between the two countries to ease.

“There is really a very substantial overlap of interest in these countries and the interest of the world,” Schwarzman said. “I expect to see much less tension.”

The U.S.-China Business Council, a group representing more than 230 large American companies operating in China, last week called on the Biden administration to roll back Trump's tariffs and "craft a more nuanced and effective trade policy toward China." The group, citing findings of research by Oxford Economics, said that gradually scaling back tariffs to 12% from the current 19% would produce an additional $169 billion in U.S. GDP and create 145,000 additional American jobs by 2025.

But Biden has ruled out reducing the tariffs right away. Aides have said he intends to review all aspects of the U.S.-China relationship deliberately before deciding which Trump policies to keep, modify or scrap.

Scott Kennedy, senior adviser with the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, urges sorting the China policies Biden will inherit from Trump into four categories: those the U.S. can change without discussing with allies (such as rejoining the Paris Accord and World Health Organization); conflicts it can resolve through dialog with China (such as approving visas for journalists or reassessing the TikTok ban); issues on which the U.S. should hold firm (including placing sanctions on Hong Kong and delisting Chinese companies who won't comply with U.S. disclosure rules); and matters U.S. should decide in coordination with U.S. allies (such as how to deal with Chinese companies that pose a potential threat to national security).

"The Biden administration," Kennedy wrote, "has a greater opportunity for policy innovation on China than many appreciate."

Capitalizing on that opportunity may take more than Biden's first 100 days.