(Reuters) -President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for U.S. Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, will prioritize delivering on election tax cut pledges, he told the Wall Street Journal in an interview published on Sunday.
Bessent told the WSJ that tax cut measures would include making Trump’s first term tax cuts permanent, as well as eliminating taxes on tips, social-security benefits and overtime pay.
Bessent would also focus on enacting tariffs, cutting spending and maintaining the status of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency, he told the newspaper in the interview.
Bessent, who has been a donor, economic adviser and booster on TV for Trump, was nominated as U.S. Treasury secretary by Trump on Friday.
Bessent has spent his career in finance, working for macro investment billionaire George Soros and noted short seller Jim Chanos, and has advocated for tax reform and deregulation, particularly to spur bank lending and energy production, as noted in a recent opinion piece he wrote for The Wall Street Journal.
As U.S. Treasury secretary, Bessent will essentially be the highest-ranking U.S. economic official, responsible for maintaining the world’s largest economy, from collecting taxes and paying the nation’s bills to managing the $28.6-trillion Treasury debt market and overseeing financial regulation.
The Treasury boss also runs U.S. financial sanctions policy, has influence over the U.S.-led International Monetary Fund, World Bank and other international financial institutions, and manages national security screenings of foreign investments in the United States.
(Reporting by Kanjyik Ghosh; Editing by Himani Sarkar and Michael Perry)
