Trump chooses Bessent, Vought, Chavez-DeRemer, and Turner for Cabinet

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

Mr. Trump also said he would nominate Russell Vought to lead the Office of Management and Budget, a position Mr. Vought held during the first Trump presidency. Mr. Vought was closely involved with Project 2025, a conservative blueprint for the former president’s second term that he tried to distance himself from during the campaign.

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

Mr. Trump said Mr. Bessent would “help me usher in a new Golden Age for the United States,” while Mr. Vought “knows exactly how to dismantle the Deep State and end Weaponized Government.”

These were only two of several personnel decisions that Trump disclosed Friday evening.

President-elect Trump said he chose Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer, an Oregon Republican, as his labor secretary, and Scott Turner, a former football player who worked in his first administration, as housing secretary.

Rounding out his health team, Trump chose Dr. Janette Nesheiwat, a general practitioner and Fox News contributor, as 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 Johns Hopkins surgeon, to head the Food and Drug Administration. Mr. Trump previously said he would nominate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime spreader of conspiracy theories about vaccines, as health secretary.

Alex Wong was named as principal deputy national security adviser, while Sebastian Gorka will serve as senior director for counterterrorism. Mr. Wong worked on issues involving Asia during Trump’s first term, and Mr. Gorka is a conservative commentator who spent less than a year in Trump’s White House.

Mr. Bessent is the founder of hedge fund Key Square Capital Management, having worked on and off for Soros Fund Management since 1991. If confirmed by the Senate, he would be the nation’s first openly gay treasury secretary. In August, he told Bloomberg that attacking the U.S. national debt should be a priority, which includes 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, with both the Trump and Biden administrations having added to it. In his previous administration, Mr. Trump’s policies added $8.4 trillion to the national debt, while the Biden administration increased the national debt by half that – $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, Mr. Bessent has backed extending provisions of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, which Mr. Trump signed into law in his first year in office. Estimates from various economic analyses of the costs of the various 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 adviser, Mr. Bessent donated to various Democratic causes in the early 2000s, notably Al Gore’s presidential run. He also worked for George Soros, a major supporter of Democrats. Mr. Bessent had an influential role in Mr. Soros’ London operations, including his famous 1992 bet against the pound, which generated huge profits on “Black Wednesday,” when the pound was de-linked from European currencies.

Mr. 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, president-elect Trump called Mr. Bessent “one of the top analysts on Wall Street.”

Mr. Bessent told Bloomberg in August that he views tariffs as a “one time price adjustment” and “not inflationary,” and tariffs imposed during a second Trump administration would be directed primarily at China. And he wrote in a Fox News op-ed this week that tariffs are “a useful tool for achieving the president’s foreign policy objectives,” such as encouraging allies to spend more on defense or deterring military aggression.

He has also floated ideas for how the Trump administration could put pressure on Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, whose term expires in May 2026. Last month, he suggested naming a replacement chair early, and let that person function as a “shadow” chair, with the goal of sidelining Chairman Powell.

But after the election, Mr. Bessent reportedly backed away from that plan. Mr. Powell, for his part, has said he wouldn’t step down if Mr. Trump asked him to do so, and added that he doesn’t have the authority to fire him.

Mr. Vought 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. A graduate of Wheaton College and George Washington University Law School, he had a deep knowledge of government finances that has been paired with his Christian faith.

After Trump’s initial term ended, Mr. 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,” Mr. Vought wrote in the introduction.

His proposed budget plan would cut spending on food aid through the Agriculture Department. There would be a $3.3 trillion reduction in spending in the Health and Human Services Department, in large part through the distribution of Medicaid and Medicare funds. It also contains about $642 billion in cuts to the Affordable Care Act. The budgets for the Housing and Urban Development and Education departments would also be cut.

Mr. Trump’s choice for labor secretary, Ms. Chavez-DeRemer, narrowly lost her reelection bid earlier this month. She is one of a few House Republicans to endorse the “Protecting the Right to Organize” or PRO Act that would allow more workers to conduct organizing campaigns and would add penalties for companies that violate workers’ rights. The act would also weaken “right-to-work” laws that allow employees in more than half the states to avoid participating in or paying dues to unions that represent workers at their places of employment.

Mr. Trump said in a statement that she would help “ensure that the Labor Department can unite Americans of all backgrounds behind our Agenda for unprecedented National Success.”

This story is from The Associated Press and was reported and written by Fatima Hussein, Chris Rugaber, Josh Boak, and Chris Megerian in Washington, D.C.