The Senate voted on Monday from 68 to 29 to confirm Scott Besent as secretary of the Treasury of President Trump, establishing the main economic official of the new administration that will direct an agenda focused on tax cuts, tariffs and deregulation.
Besent, an administrator of multimillionaire coverage funds with a deep experience in financial markets, is assuming work, since Trump is running to redo the United States economy in line with his vision “America First”. The new Treasury Secretary will be responsible for helping to develop the tax policies of the Trump administration, to draw the way to obtain more rates on Mexico, Canada and China, and create the first budget of the administration.
The work will be the first time that an expanding organization will supervise or work in the government. Mr. Besent, who is the first openly gay secretary secretary, said during his confirmation hearing that he was previously rejected from public service opportunities due to his sexual orientation.
The arrival of Mr. Besent to the Treasury will announce a strong deviation from the Biden administration policies. The department programs are expected to focus on equity and weather be closed, and Mr. Bessent has said that the staff will no longer be allowed to work remotely.
Many of the executive orders that Trump signed during his first week in office will fall before the Department of Treasury and Mr. Bessent to study. He has already been asked to investigate the viability of a new “external income service” that would raise tariff income, review the monetary practices of US commercial partners and identify foreign countries that submit Americans to discriminatory taxes.
One of the most pressing business orders that Mr. Bessent will face is to deal with the debt limit. Before leaving office, the Secretary of the Treasury, Janet L. Yellen, warned the Congress that the Treasury Department would need to deploy “extraordinary measures” on January 21 to prevent the United States from breaching their debt if legislators did not raise or suspend The nation’s loan limit.
If legislators struggle to reach an agreement on the debt limit for this summer, Besent will be under pressure to carefully manage the expenses and accounting of the federal government to ensure that the United State can continue paying their invoices.
As Secretary of the Treasury, Mr. Besent will be a central figure in economic negotiations with China. During his confirmation hearing on January 16, he said that during his first week at work he would press his Chinese counterparts to comply with the promises that the country made in the 2020 trade agreement he signed with the United States.
The Department of the Treasury also supervises the internal tax service, whose commissioner resigned on the day of the inauguration of Mr. Trump, and Besent will be responsible for bringing changes to a fiscal agency that Republicans do traditionally. That challenge could be tense, since millions of taxpayers are preparing to submit their tax statements and the staff and leadership of the agency are in Limbo.
Mr. Besent is in the process of disinvesting many of its investments to avoid possible conflicts of interest. He faced the questions of the Democrats in the Senate Finance Committee after a review of their tax statements by the members of the Democratic personnel showed that he had raised the profits of his coverage fund in a way that allowed him to avoid pay more than $ 900,000 in payroll taxes.
Mr. Besent argues that he was acting according to tax laws and that if there are changes in question, he is currently the subject of litigation, he is prepared to pay additional funds.
While many of Mr. Trump’s cabinet teams have proven to be controversial, Besent, who used to be a great donor of the Democrats, obtained some support from them.
In his confirmation hearing, Besent suggested that Mr. Trump’s second mandate was a “generational opportunity to unleash a new economic gold age that will create more jobs, wealth and prosperity for all Americans.”
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