Howard Lutnick, Trump’s pick for Commerce Secretary, with Trump at Mar-a-Lago on Dec. 16.

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Since winning the election on Nov. 5, Donald Trump has moved remarkably, if not unexpectedly, quickly to name his picks for top leadership posts in his administration. While Trump’s campaign rhetoric suggested a strong America-first, strong-dollar, tariff-led protectionist trade policy with low taxes and lower government spending at home, his picks are presenting a picture of an administration that may be more moderate, and may be fiercely at odds with itself.

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It’s impossible to know at this point who the winners will be, and what policies will make it through Congress or even his own staff. But to get started, Weekend Brief has put together a scouting guide to Trump’s key economic advisers and what they might do.

Treasury Secretary: Scott Bessent

Bessent, a lifelong student (and one-time Yale professor) of economic history, made his fortune betting on a combination of geopolitics and economic data to take large positions ahead of seismic shocks to the global economic system. As a hedge fund manager for Trump’s arch-nemesis, George Soros, Bessent led the team that bet against the British pound, breaking the Bank of England and forcing the British pound out of the pre-euro European Currency Union. He also made Soros’ fund a $1 billion profit. Bessent told the Wall Street Journal his priority will be to deliver Trump’s promised tax cuts. He’s said he supports Trump’s plan for high tariffs on imports to encourage U.S. industrial growth, even as hundreds of economists, including this year’s Nobel Prize winner, Simon Johnson, said tariffs will only raise prices for U.S. consumers. Bessent said a key task will be ensuring the dollar remains the world’s reserve currency. That’s a tall order for anyone, and the contradictory demands of tax cuts, deficit reduction, tariffs, and economic growth are probably impossible to balance. Still, he’s pushed Trump to adopt a 3-3-3 strategy, lifted from the playbook of former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who revitalized his country’s economy in the 2010s. Bessent wants to cut the deficit to 3% of GDP by 2028, raise GDP growth to 3% annually, and produce 3 million barrels of oil a day, all by 2028. It’s in the service, Bessent has said, of keeping the U.S. at the forefront of the global economy. “We are going to have to have some kind of a grand global economic reordering,” Bessent said at a June event. “I’d like to be a part of it. I’ve studied this.”

Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers: Stephen Miran

Miran worked in the Treasury in Trump’s first term, and he’ll be Trump’s chief economic adviser. Armed with PhD in economics from Harvard, Miran worked for the conservative Manhattan Institute and has criticized both current Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and Triump-appointed Fed chair Jerome Powell. He accused Yellen of manipulating markets to lower borrowing costs and secretly stimulate the economy, a charge Yellen ridiculed. A Treasury official told Bloomberg that the critique was based on outdated predictions, not actual data. Miran faulted Powell, a Trump appointee, for being “wrong politically and economically,” when he urged Congress to pass a stimulus bill in October 2020. Miran’s come out strongly in favor of tariffs, saying “tariffs are pretty effective if wielded smartly,” a break with his colleagues at the Manhattan Institute, who argue that increasing trade is “not the problem, and restricting it is not the solution.” Miran has called to reign in the independence of the Federal Reserve Bank, and said he’s a big fan of cryptocurrency, arguing that it has “a big role potentially to play in innovation and ushering in another Trump administration economic boom.”

Secretary of Commerce: Howard Lutnick

A billionaire Wall Street executive, Lutnick has been a key economic adviser to Trump during his campaign and has been leading Trump’s transition team. Lutnick has called for lower taxes, more fossil fuel production, and tariffs to protect U.S. businesses. China watchers say Lutnick’s selection all but guarantees a trade war with China, one that many economists say the U.S. cannot win.

As Politico noted last week, “his public comments in recent months show his grasp of trade economics remains shaky.” Lutnick first rose to national prominence when 658 employees at his brokerage and trading firm, Cantor Fitzgerald, died in the attacks on the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. Cantor Fitzgerald’s offices were near the top of the North Tower, just above the point at which American Airlines Flight 11 crashed into the tower. Lutnick’s loyalty to Trump seems unquestionable: He raised or donated $75 million to Trump’s 2024 campaign, and he has publicly declared that appointees must be loyal to Trump. But Trump has complained about Lutnick, privately expressing frustration that Lutnick has been “hanging around him too much” and “manipulating the transition process for his own ends,” The New York Times reported. Lutnick lost out to Bessent for the job of treasury secretary in what Mar-a-Lago insiders told several media was a “knife fight,” with Lutnick as the aggressor. Earlier this month. Lutnick’s firm agreed to pay the S.E.C. $6.75 million after it was sued for allegedly misleading investors in the leadup to two public offerings that raised $750 million. Cantor Fitzgerald did not admit or deny responsibility.

Chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission: Paul Atkins

An S.E.C. commissioner under President George W. Bush, Atkins is a strong advocate for looser regulation, particularly of cryptocurrencies. Atkins is an attorney, and he spent the years since his S.E.C. appointment ended in 2008 consulting to banks and investment firms on compliance and regulatory issues. He helped draft a set of best practices for cryptocurrency trading platforms and serves as co-chair of a crypto trade group called the Token Alliance. One former S.E.C. lawyer called him the “godfather of Republican capital markets policy.” His support for cryptocurrencies is likely to put him at odds with an agency that has been taking a heavy regulatory approach to crypto assets under its current chair, Gary Gensler. The conflicts of interest are potentially vast here, as Trump himself has launched a crypto token called WLFI, and his crypto company, World Liberty Financial, said it plans to launch a dollar-pegged stablecoin.

The crypto industry spent at least $100 million supporting Trump’s campaign, and Atkins is expected to ease up on regulation. Proponents of corporate environmental, social, and governance reforms, known as ESG, say they expect the S.E.C. under Atkins to show greater deference to what corporations want and less emphasis on corporate responsibility. In 2022, Atkins joined a number of other former S.E.C. commissioners in a joint letter to Gensler saying new climate-risk disclosure rules overstepped the Commission’s regulatory authority. “His view, I think, would be that you focus on what’s good for business to maximize returns in the short term, and everything flows from that,” Michael Posner, director of the Center of Business and Human Rights at New York University’s Stern School of Business, told the trade publication ESG Dive.

EPA Administrator: Lee Zeldin

As Trump implements his plans to gut decades of environmental and climate protection programs that he says have hampered U.S. industry, particularly in the automotive, oil, and gas sectors, he’s appointed a former New York congressman, Lee Zeldin, to run the Environmental Protection Administration. The agency was created under Republican President Richard Nixon in 1970, but Trump campaigned on promises to kill EPA rules on pollution from everything from car tailpipes to oil and gas wells and to slow the transition to electric vehicles (a position that has him at odds with First Buddy Elon Musk). Zeldin won Trump’s attention for voting against certifying the 2020 election results, which Trump lost. In a statement, Zeldin said after Trump named him as his choice: “We will restore US energy dominance, revitalize our auto industry to bring back American jobs, and make the US the global leader of AI. We will do so while protecting access to clean air and water.” Zeldin has scant experience in environmental affairs and earned a lifetime score of 14% from the League of Conservation Voters. Environmental regulations are “causing businesses to go in the wrong direction,” Zeldin told Fox News. If confirmed, he is expected to faithfully implement the Project 2025 playbook for the EPA, which includes slashing the EPA’s budget, ousting career staff, eliminating scientific advisers that review the agency’s work, and closing programs that focus on minority communities with heavily polluted air and water, The New York Times reported.

Director of the Office of Management and Budget: Russell Vought

Behind that bureaucratic mouthful of a title is the person deciding how the government will spend its $7 trillion-plus annual budget. Vought is a key figure in Project 2025, the conservative Heritage Foundation’s plan to rework the American government to boost the power of the president and slash the role of government in protecting the American people. Vought’s take-no-prisoners style has won him deep admiration from the far right, with his promises to upend what he calls the “deep state” and dismantle “woke and weaponized government,” even refusing to spend all the money Congress appropriates. But Sen. Patty Murray, a Washington Democrat who serves on the Appropriations Committee that would vet Vought, called him a “far-right ideologue” who wants to unlawfully expand executive spending powers, fire tens of thousands of federal workers, and “gut programs that help working families.” Vought doesn’t exactly disagree. He’s pledged to let political appointees oversee government spending, cut back food stamps and student debt relief, and end civil service protection for government employees so they can be fired and replaced with loyal partisans. He’s also promised to work closely with Elon Musk’s yet-to-be-created advisory panel on government efficiency, DOGE. “There certainly is going to be mass layoffs and firings, particularly at some of the agencies that we don’t even think should exist,” Vought said in an interview last month with Tucker Carlson.”

U.S. Trade Representative: Jamieson Greer

A 44-year-old trade litigator who was a key aide to Trump’s first trade rep, tariff-fan Robert Lighthizer, Greer will be the point man for Trump’s contentious and problematic plan to slap tariffs on imports to the U.S., including a 60% tax on goods from China, and tariffs of 20% to 25% on imports from the two largest U.S. trading partners, Canada and Mexico. In testimony to Congress last year, Greer said he didn’t believe open trade with China would help the U.S. “From a defense perspective, it is critically important to restore the U.S. manufacturing base to ensure that the U.S. can credibly deter escalation by China and, if necessary, defend its national security interests at home and abroad,” Greer said. He called Biden’s approach to China “hot rhetoric [in] the place of meaningful action” and said he did not buy “the myth that more trade reduces the likelihood of conflict.”

He urged Congress to end permanent normal trade relations with China, which would violate U.S. obligations under the World Trade Organization, while simultaneously calling for open trade agreements with the U.K., India, Kenya, and the Philippines.

In his 2023 book, “No Trade is Free,” Lighthizer called Greer “organized, patient, and always at the office.” Greer faces a conundrum similar to that facing Trump’s Treasury pick, Scott Bessent. Protectionism and tariffs rarely lead to economic growth and generally boost inflation. The Smoot-Hawley tariffs of 1930 are generally blamed for adding years to the Great Depression. Economists note that Trump’s proposed tariffs would, like the wall on the southern border, not be paid for by America’s trading partners. Instead, higher tariffs will be nothing more than a sales tax on imported goods that would be paid by consumers, not by exporters, and raise inflation while doing nothing to boost U.S. productivity.

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A guide to Trumps economic cabinet