(Bloomberg) -- President-elect Donald Trump is tapping Cantor Fitzgerald LP chief executive officer Howard Lutnick to lead the Commerce Department, a central pick in an administration that will likely be shaped by sweeping tariff hike proposals.
“I am thrilled to announce that Howard Lutnick, Chairman & CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald, will join my Administration as the United States Secretary of Commerce. He will lead our Tariff and Trade agenda, with additional direct responsibility for the Office of the United States Trade Representative,” Trump said in a post on Truth Social on Tuesday.
Lutnick, 63, is one of Trump’s most prominent Wall Street backers, bolstering his outreach to the financial community and embracing his populist agenda. He criss-crossed the country in support of the president-elect, bemoaned the shift in American manufacturing jobs overseas, assailed “coastal elite nonsense” over electric cars and hammered high inflation as “the meanest thing you can ever do to your people.”
As co-chair of Trump’s transition team, Lutnick played a frontline role in preparing the incoming president to retake power and push through his conservative agenda with a team of like-minded loyalists.
The Commerce Department, which serves as liaison between the federal government and the private sector, will play a key role in facilitating Trump’s policies. The agency’s main objective is to promote domestic jobs and economic growth.
The announcement partially settles what had been a multi-day public battle between hedge fund manager Scott Bessent and Lutnick, who had both been posturing to receive the Treasury secretary title. Lutnick had won over Elon Musk’s support, with the billionaire entrepreneur posting on X over the weekend that the Cantor Fitzgerald CEO would “actually enact change.”
The infighting had frustrated Trump, who is currently considering other candidates for the top economic job, according to people familiar with the matter. The president-elect is scheduled to meet with former Federal Reserve Governor Kevin Warsh in the next day or two, people said.
Apollo Global Management Inc. CEO Marc Rowan and Tennessee Senator Bill Hagerty are also under consideration for Treasury, people familiar with the discussions said. Bessent discussed both the Treasury and National Economic Council director job with Trump last week, people said.
Tariff Plans
Trump’s announcement of the Commerce pick gives Lutnick broad authority over the White House’s trade and tariff agenda, a central plank of the president-elect’s economic plan.
Trump has floated imposing 10% or 20% baseline tariffs on all imports, and as much as 60% on imports from China — one of America’s top suppliers. Other possible targets for duty hikes include vehicles from Mexico and countries that abandon the US dollar.
Some economists forecast that Trump’s tariff proposals could cause inflationary effects for consumers. Still, although the former president imposed 25% tariffs on hundreds of billions of dollars of Chinese goods during his first term, the impact ultimately remains unclear, according to Bloomberg Economics. President Joe Biden left most of Trump’s tariffs in place, even adding some additional tax increases on semiconductors and electric vehicles from China.
Under Biden’s administration, the Commerce Department has been occupied with implementing a string of industrial policy bills, including allocating federal funding for semiconductor manufacturing.
‘Apprentice’ Guest
A graduate of Haverford College, Lutnick joined Cantor Fitzgerald in 1983 and became president and CEO in 1991, according to his biography on the firm’s website. His brother Gary Lutnick was among the 658 Cantor employees killed in the attack on the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001.
Lutnick was credited with rebuilding the devastated firm.
Once a guest on Trump’s reality show Celebrity Apprentice, he sits near the center of many concentric circles of money and power in the president-elect’s orbit — more so than many other Wall Street executives. And he has a key spot in the ecosystem around Trump and the “Make America Great Again” faithful in his role as transition chair.
Trump, backed by congressional Republicans, has vowed to roll back aspects of Biden’s signature climate bill, likely meaning a decline in federal funding for green projects. Undoing the law, known as the Inflation Reduction Act, could prove to be difficult, though, since some of its incentives are very popular with oil companies and other core GOP constituencies.
The Commerce Department is also the parent agency of the Bureau of Economic Analysis — which produces a key inflation metric favored by the Federal Reserve — as well as the Census Bureau, responsible for releasing its namesake decennial survey in addition to other reports on the state of the economy.
The Trump administration ended the 2020 census count early before the end of his term, drawing the ire of some civil-rights groups. Separately, he pursued an unsuccessful effort to exclude undocumented immigrants from the tabulation, which is used to divvy up congressional seats and federal funds.
--With assistance from Molly Smith.
(Updates to add details in paragraphs 6-9)
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