Hours after announcing last November that he would retire from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in 2018, President William Dudley warned in a speech against rolling back key elements of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act. Any changes to the law, which was passed in 2010 in response to the financial crisis, should be made “with a paring knife, rather than with a meat cleaver,” he said.

Since then, the deregulatory efforts of the Trump era have only ramped up, and even some Democrats are on board: A bipartisan bill that would do exactly what Dudley warned against is nearing passage in the Senate. That makes the decision on his replacement all the more important, as it could bolster or degrade the first line of defense against Wall Street abuses.

As the lead bank supervisor for the New York region, which includes the majority of the nation’s biggest banks, the New York Fed plays a key role in preventing risk to the financial system. The president also sits on the Federal Open Market Committee, which sets interest rates and determines monetary policy. There are few more important policymakers in the country for safeguarding the nation’s economy.

But a lack of diversity impedes that mission—not just diversity of identity, but of thought and experience. Every president in the 100-plus years of the New York Fed has been a white male. Every president either worked on Wall Street before taking the position or afterward. Fed Up, a coalition of community and labor groups, argues in a new report that this homogeneity creates blind spots, protecting financial institutions while neglecting those who are still struggling 10 years after the financial crisis struck.

“New York Federal Reserve Bank leadership, made up of executives from regulated banks and companies, pursued interventions in 2008 that dramatically benefited the very institutions they were charged with regulating,” the report states. Despite the belief that the economy has fully recovered, “Black and Latino families were disproportionately impacted by all of these challenges before, during, and after the Great Recession and continue to face enormous barriers.” One statistic stands out: African-American wealth has dropped 28 percent over the past decade.