In July 2021, Steele was nominated by President Joe Biden to serve as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Financial Institutions.

[2] Steele previously served as director of the Corporations and Society Initiative at the Stanford Graduate School of Business (GSB).

[4] Originally from Brookline, Massachusetts, Steele attended the University of Rochester for his undergraduate education, where he received a degree in political science in 2002.

[2] Steele is considered a member of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, having supported the presidential campaign of Elizabeth Warren in 2020.

[16] According to a Wall Street Journal article about his nomination, Steele believes that the Federal Reserve "could use its authority to limit fossil-fuel investments based on their prospective risks to financial stability..."[3] In a 2019 letter to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), Steele argued in favor of restricting derivatives trading to minimize the risk the market poses to the global economy.