(Reuters) – President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent will prioritize delivering on election tax cut promises, he told the Wall Street Journal in a statement interview published on Sunday.
Bessent told the WSJ that the tax cuts would include making Trump’s first-term tax cuts permanent, and eliminating taxes on tips, Social Security benefits and overtime.
Bessent would also focus on imposing tariffs, cutting spending and preserving the dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency, he told the newspaper in the interview.
Bessent, who was a donor, economic advisor and TV booster for Trump, was nominated by Trump on Friday as US Treasury Secretary.
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 boost bank lending and energy production, as noted in a recent op-ed he wrote for. The Wall Street Journal.
As US Treasury Secretary, Bessent will essentially be the top US economic official, responsible for maintaining the world’s largest economy, from collecting taxes and paying the country’s bills to managing the $28.6 trillion government bond market and oversight of financial regulation.
The Treasury Department boss also implements U.S. financial sanctions policy, influences the U.S.-led International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and other international financial institutions, and manages national security investigations of foreign investments in the United States.
(Reporting by Kanjyik Ghosh; Editing by Himani Sarkar and Michael Perry)
