President-elect Donald Trump announced Friday that he will nominate hedge fund manager Scott Bessent, a proponent of deficit reduction, to be the next Treasury secretary.
Trump also said he would nominate Russell Vought to head the Office of Management and Budget, a position Vought held during Trump’s first presidency. Vought was closely involved in Project 2025, a conservative plan for Trump’s second term that he tried to distance himself from during the campaign.
These announcements showed how much Trump was beefing up the financial side of his new administration. Although Bessent is closely aligned with Wall Street and could win bipartisan support, Vought is known as a diehard Republican.
Trump nominations and candidates
Here are some of the people President-elect Donald Trump has appointed to senior positions in his administration. Positions in orange require Senate confirmation.
Trump said Bessent would “help me usher in a new golden age for the United States,” while Vought “knows exactly how to dismantle the deep state and end militarized government.”
Bessent and Vought are just two of several personnel decisions Trump disclosed Friday evening.
Trump said he chose Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer, a Republican from Oregon, as labor secretary, and Scott Turner, a former football player who worked in Trump’s first administration, as housing secretary .
Additionally, Trump has completed his health team. He chose Dr. Janette Nesheiwat, a general practitioner and Fox News contributor, as his general surgeon; Dr. Dave Weldon, former Republican congressman from Florida, to lead the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; and Johns Hopkins surgeon Dr. Marty Makary, head of the Food and Drug Administration. Trump previously announced he would nominate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime propagator of vaccine conspiracy theories, as health secretary.
Alex Wong has been named deputy principal national security adviser, while Sebastian Gorka will be senior director for counterterrorism. Wong worked on issues involving Asia during Trump’s first term, and Gorka is a conservative commentator who spent less than a year in the Trump White House.
Bessent, 62, is the founder of hedge fund Key Square Capital Management, having worked intermittently for Soros Fund Management since 1991. If confirmed by the Senate, he would be the nation’s first openly gay Treasury secretary.
He told Bloomberg in August that tackling the U.S. national debt should be a priority, which means slashing government programs and other spending.
“This electoral cycle is the last chance for the United States to get out of this mountain of debt without becoming a kind of European-style socialist democracy,” he said at the time.
As of November 8, the national debt stood at $35.94 trillion, and both the Trump and Biden administrations increased it. Trump’s policies added $8.4 trillion to the national debt, while the Biden administration increased the national debt by $4.3 trillion, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a budget watchdog.
Bondi served as Florida’s attorney general from 2011 to 2019 after being the first woman elected to the position.
Even as he works to reduce the national debt by stopping spending, Bessent has supported extending provisions of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, which Trump signed into law during his first year of mandate. Estimates from various economic analyzes of the costs of various tax cuts range from nearly $6 trillion to $10 trillion over 10 years. Almost all of the provisions of the law will expire at the end of 2025.
Before becoming a Trump donor and advisor, Bessent donated to various Democratic causes in the early 2000s, including Al Gore’s presidential campaign. He also worked for George Soros, a major supporter of the Democrats. Bessent played an influential role in Soros’s London operations, including his famous 1992 bet against the pound sterling, which generated huge profits on “Black Wednesday,” when the pound sterling was delinked from European currencies .
Bessent’s selection was not surprising; he was among the names proposed for the position of Treasury Secretary. At a Detroit Economic Club event in October, Trump called Bessent “one of the best analysts on Wall Street.”
Bessent told Bloomberg in August that he viewed the tariffs as a “one-time price adjustment” and “non-inflationary,” and that tariffs imposed under a second Trump administration would be aimed primarily at China. And he wrote in a Fox News op-ed this week that tariffs are “a useful tool for achieving the president’s foreign policy goals,” such as encouraging allies to spend more on defense or deterring military aggression.
Bessent also floated ideas for how the Trump administration could put pressure on Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, whose term expires in May 2026. Last month, Bessent suggested that Trump could appoint a chairman of replacement sooner and let this person function as a “shadow”. chair, essentially aiming to sideline Powell.
But after the elections, Bessent reportedly gave up on this project. Powell, for his part, said he would not resign if Trump asked him to, and added that Trump, as president, did not have the authority to fire him.
Trump repeatedly attacked Powell during his first term as president for raising the Fed’s benchmark rate in 2017 and 2018. During the 2024 campaign, he said that as president, he should have its “say” on the central bank’s interest rate decisions. Presidents traditionally avoid commenting on Fed policy.
Vought, 48, served as head of the Office of Management and Budget from mid-2020 until the end of Trump’s first term in 2021, after serving as acting director and deputy director. A graduate of Wheaton College and the George Washington University Law School, he had extensive knowledge of public finance coupled with his own Christian faith.
After Trump’s initial term ended, Vought founded the Center for Renewing America, a think tank that describes its mission as renewing “a consensus about America as a nation under God.”
The Center for Renewing America released its own 2023 budget proposal titled “A Commitment to End Work and Militarized Government.” The proposal envisioned spending cuts worth $11.3 trillion over 10 years and about $2 trillion in income tax cuts to return the budget to a surplus by 2032.
“The immediate threat facing the nation is that the people no longer govern the country; instead, government itself is increasingly being used as a weapon against the people it is supposed to serve,” Vought wrote in the introduction.
The New York City judge overseeing President-elect Donald Trump’s case says there will be no sentencing next week.
Vought’s proposed budget plan would cut food aid spending through the Department of Agriculture. There would be $3.3 trillion in spending reductions in the Department of Health and Human Services, largely due to the way Medicaid and Medicare funds are distributed. It also contains about $642 billion in cuts to the Affordable Care Act. The budgets of the housing, urban development and education departments would also be cut.
Vought’s budget ideas were independent of those of Trump, who has not fully detailed the details of his economic plans, aside from campaigning on income tax cuts and tariff hikes.
Trump’s pick for labor secretary, Chavez-DeRemer, 56, narrowly lost his re-election bid earlier this month. She received strong support from union members in her district.
Chavez-DeRemer is one of the few House Republicans to support the Protecting the Right to Organize, or PRO, Act, which would allow more workers to lead union organizing campaigns and add penalties for companies that violate workers’ rights. workers. The law would also weaken “right to work” laws that allow employees in more than half of states to avoid participating in or paying dues to unions that represent workers in their workplaces.
Trump said in a statement that she would help “ensure that the Department of Labor can unite Americans from all walks of life behind our agenda for unprecedented national success.”
