Scott Bessent, a hedge fund manager, has been chosen by President-elect Donald Trump to be secretary of the Treasury Department. Trump chose a Wall Street figure that he praised during his campaign for a key leadership job in his second administration.
People have thought for months that Bessent would be a good choice for the Treasury job. He has called for a second Trump presidency to focus on lowering the federal debt, reducing regulations, and making more energy. He has also supported the president-elect’s economic policies against claims that they will cause inflation. In July, he told MarketWatch that the idea that they would cause inflation was “absurd.”
“Many people respect Scott as one of the best international investors, geopolitical and economic strategists in the world,” Trump said in a statement.
At a campaign event in North Carolina in August, Trump said that Bessent is an investor who is “thought to be one of the best on all of Wall Street.” The founder and CEO of Key Square Capital Management is Bessent. He was chief investment officer at Soros Fund Management before that. Soros Fund Management was started by the famous businessman and Democratic megadonor George Soros.
After Bessent was named Treasury secretary, Terry Haines, founder of Pangaea Policy, wrote in a note that investors believe Bessent will listen to Wall Street, smooth out rough policy edges, and make the most of Trump’s economic policy on tariffs and other issues to help the market.
In an interview with the Financial Times in October, Bessent said that Trump’s plans to raise tariffs were “maximalist” and could be changed after talks. Some Trump supporters have said that Bessent doesn’t support the new administration’s plans for tariffs enough, and they backed other candidates for the Treasury job. For his part, Bessent seems to have reacted to these worries in part by writing a column for Fox News in which he praised tariffs.
In his statement, Trump said that Bessent would “support my policies that will make the U.S. more competitive, stop unfair trade imbalances, and work to build an economy that puts growth first, especially as we become the world’s energy leader.”
In the same interview with FT, Bessent said Trump would not get in the way of the Federal Reserve’s independence, but he would choose a new chair to replace Jerome Powell when his term ends in 2026. Powell told reporters that it’s “not permitted by the law” for presidents to fire Fed members and that he would not resign if Trump asked him to.
Giving a lot of money to groups backing Trump’s campaign for president and other Republican groups in 2023 and 2024, Bessent gave more than $3 million, according to public records.
Along with Bessent’s nomination as Treasury secretary, the president-elect announced a lot of other cabinet picks late Friday night.
Trump said that he chose Russell Vought to lead the Office of Management and Budget. Vought already held this job during Trump’s first term in office.
He also picked Rick Scott, a former football player who worked in Trump’s first government, to lead the Department of Housing and Urban Development and Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer, a Republican from Oregon, to be secretary of the Labor Department.
As part of his health team, the president-elect chose Dr. Janette Nesheiwat, a general practitioner and Fox News contributor, to be surgeon general, Dr. Dave Weldon, a former Republican congressman from Florida, to lead the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and Dr. Marty Makary, a surgeon from Johns Hopkins, to be head of the Food and Drug Administration. Trump had said before that he would put forward Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as secretary of health and human services.
Trump also said that Sebastian Gorka will be the senior director for counterterrorism and named Alex Wong as the principal deputy principal national security assistant. Gorka is a conservative commentator who worked for less than a year in Trump’s first administration. Wong worked on Asian problems during Trump’s first term.
