Trump picks Bessent as Treasury secretary, Vought top budget official

A man sits in a blue suit jacket and green tie

By Fatima Hussein and Chris Rugaber

Nov. 22, 2024 Updated 5:30 PM PT

WASHINGTON — President-elect Donald Trump announced Friday that he’ll nominate billionaire hedge fund manager Scott Bessent, an advocate for deficit reduction, to serve as his next Treasury secretary.

Trump also said he would nominate Russell Vought to lead the Office of Management and Budget, a position Vought held during Trump’s first presidency. Vought was closely involved with Project 2025, contributing to the conservative blueprint for Trump’s second term that the president-elect had disavowed during the campaign.

The announcements Friday evening showed how Trump was fleshing out the financial side of his new administration. Although Bessent is closely aligned with Wall Street and could earn bipartisan support, Vought is known as a Republican hard-liner.

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 Weaponized Government.”

In a separate announcement, Trump said he had chosen Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer, an Oregon Republican who lost her reelection bid this month, as his Labor secretary. “I look forward to working with her to create tremendous opportunity for American Workers,” Trump said in a statement.

And the president-elect said he will nominate former NFL player and White House aide Scott Turner as secretary of Housing and Urban Development. Turner ran the White House Opportunity and Revitalization Council during Trump’s first term.

Trump, in a statement, credited Turner, the highest-ranking Black person he’s selected for his administration, with “helping to lead an Unprecedented Effort that Transformed our Country’s most distressed communities.”

Bessent, 62, served for years as a top money manager for George Soros, a billionaire donor to Democrats. Bessent is the founder of hedge fund Key Square Capital Management, after having worked on and off for Soros Fund Management since 1991. If confirmed by the Senate, Bessent would be the nation’s first out gay Treasury secretary.

He told Bloomberg in August that he decided to join Trump’s campaign in part to attack the mounting U.S. national debt. That would include slashing government programs and other spending.

“This election cycle is the last chance for the U.S. to grow our way out of this mountain of debt without becoming a sort of European-style socialist democracy,” he said then.

As of Nov. 8, the national debt stands at $35.94 trillion. 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 fiscal watchdog.

Even as he pushes to lower the national debt by stopping spending, Bessent has backed extending provisions of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, which Trump signed into law in his first year in office. Estimates from economic analyses of the costs of the tax cuts range between nearly $6 trillion and $10 trillion over 10 years. Nearly all of the law’s provisions are set to expire at the end of 2025.

Before becoming a Trump donor and advisor, Bessent donated to various Democratic causes in the early 2000s, notably then-Vice President Al Gore’s presidential run. Bessent had an influential role in Soros’ London operations, including his famous 1992 bet against the pound, which generated huge profits on “Black Wednesday,” when the pound was delinked from European currencies.

Bessent’s selection wasn’t surprising; he had been among the names floated for the Treasury secretary role. At an October Detroit Economic Club event, Trump called Bessent “one of the top analysts on Wall Street.”

Bessent told Bloomberg in August that he views tariffs as a “one-time price adjustment” and “not inflationary” and that tariffs imposed during a second Trump administration would be directed primarily at China. He told Fox News this month that he had been working on a plan for “financial deportations,” explaining he would restrict the flow of remittances to migrants’ home countries.

Bessent and his husband, former New York City prosecutor John Freeman, married in 2011 and have two children.

Vought, 48, was the head of the Office of Management and Budget from mid-2020 to the end of Trump’s first term in 2021, having previously served as the acting director and deputy director. After Trump’s term ended, Vought founded the Center for Renewing America, a think tank that describes its mission as renewing “a consensus of America as a nation under God.”

The Center for Renewing America released its own 2023 budget proposal entitled “A Commitment to End Work and Weaponized Government.” The proposal envisioned $11.3 trillion worth of spending reductions over 10 years and about $2 trillion in income tax cuts in order to bring the budget into surplus by 2032.

“The immediate threat facing the nation is the fact that the people no longer govern the country; instead, the government itself is increasingly weaponized against the people it is meant to serve,” Vought wrote in the introduction.

Vought has also previously worked as the executive and budget director for the Republican Study Committee, a caucus for conservative House Republicans. He also worked at Heritage Action, the political group tied to the Heritage Foundation conservative think tank.

Vought’s proposed budget plan would make $3.3 trillion in spending cuts in the Health and Human Services Department in large part through how Medicaid and Medicare funds are distributed. It would also cut $642 billion out of the Affordable Care Act. The budgets for Education and HUD as well as spending on food aid through the Agriculture Department would be cut.

Trump has not spelled out the details of his own economic plans, other than to campaign on income tax cuts and tariff hikes.

Hussein and Rugaber write for the Associated Press. AP writer Josh Boak contributed to this report.