(Reuters) -President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for U.S. Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, will prioritize delivering on promises of poll tax cuts, 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 dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency, he told the newspaper in the interview.
Bessent, who has been a Trump donor, economic adviser and television booster, was nominated by Trump to be U.S. Treasury secretary on Friday.
Bessent has spent his career in finance, working for macro-investment billionaire George Soros and prominent short seller Jim Chanos, and has advocated for tax reform and deregulation, particularly to stimulate bank lending and energy production, as he noted in a recent op-ed he wrote for The Wall Street Journal.
As U.S. Treasury Secretary, Bessent will essentially be America’s highest-ranking 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 financial regulatory oversight.
The Treasury chief also directs U.S. financial sanctions policy, has influence over the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and other U.S.-led international financial institutions, and manages national security controls on foreign investments in the United States. .
(Reporting by Kanjyik Ghosh; Editing by Himani Sarkar and Michael Perry)