President-elect Donald Trump will nominate former Goldman Sachs
banker Steven Mnuchin to be his Treasury Secretary, two sources close to
the transition told Fox News late Tuesday.
One source told Fox that a formal announcement of Mnuchin's nomination could come as early as Wednesday.
Mnuchin had long been considered a favorite for the
Treasury position. Two weeks ago, businessman and close Trump associate
Carl Icahn tweeted that Trump was considering Mnuchin for the post.
Mnuchin, 53, was appointed Trump's campaign finance
chair this past May. Through his work, Mnuchin grew close to Trump's
children and son-in-law, Jared Kushner -- a top adviser to Trump -- and
worked with them on fundraising events.
The campaign raised at least $169 million, in
addition to the $66 million Trump spent out of his own pocket. Though
that was far short of what Hillary Clinton raised, it represented an
impressive haul given that Trump didn't begin fundraising in earnest
until the end of May.
If approved by the Senate, Mnuchin would follow in
the tradition of two previous treasury secretaries -- Robert Rubin in
the Clinton administration and Henry Paulson in George W. Bush's. All
had vast Wall Street experience gained from years spent working at
Goldman Sachs.
Yet unlike Rubin and Paulson and unlike President
Barack Obama's two treasury secretaries, Timothy Geithner and Jacob Lew,
Mnuchin would bring no government experience to Treasury, something
that could prove a hurdle in navigating the tricky politics of
Washington.
After graduating from Yale in 1985. Mnuchin worked
for Goldman Sachs for 17 years. His father, Robert Mnuchin, had himself
worked for Goldman for three decades, becoming a partner in charge of
equity trading.
The younger Mnuchin amassed his own fortune at the
firm and then left in 2002. He worked briefly for Soros Fund Management,
a hedge fund led by George Soros, before starting his own investment
firm, Dune Capital Management.
As head of this firm, Mnuchin and other investors
participated in the purchase of failed mortgage lender IndyMac in 2009
and renamed it OneWest. The failure of IndyMac in 2008 with $32 billion
in assets was one of the biggest casualties of the housing bust.
Mnuchin became chairman of OneWest, which was sold to
CIT Group in 2015. Before the sale, OneWest faced a string of lawsuits
over its home foreclosure practices.
This month, housing advocates filed a complaint
asking the Department of Housing and Urban Development to investigate
OneWest for possible violations of the Fair Housing Act. The lender
failed to place branches in minority communities, provided few mortgages
to black homebuyers and preserved foreclosed properties in white
neighborhoods while allowing similar homes in minority communities to
fall into disrepair, according to the California Reinvestment Coalition
and Fair Housing Advocates of Northern California.
CIT declined to respond directly to the complaint but
stressed in a statement that it is "committed to fair lending and works
hard to meet the credit needs of all communities and neighborhoods we
serve."
Mnuchin also became a major investor in Hollywood, helping finance a number of movies, including the 2009 blockbuster "Avatar."
As treasury secretary, Mnuchin would be the
administration's chief economic spokesman, serving as a liaison not only
to Wall Street but also to global investors, a critical role given the
trillions of dollars in treasury bonds owned by foreigners. In addition,
it would be his job to sell the new administration's economic program
to Congress.
Mnuchin will also oversee a sprawling bureaucracy
that includes the Internal Revenue Service and the agency that issues
millions of Social Security and other benefit checks each month.
Treasury also runs the agency that wages the financial war on terrorism.
Earlier Tuesday, Trump officially nominated Rep. Tom
Price, R-Ga., as Health and Human Services Secretary and tapped Elaine
Chao, former President George W. Bush's Labor Secretary, to be secretary
of transportation.
Price, a former surgeon, supports the repeal of
ObamaCare and has offered a replacement that would provide tax credits
to subsidize the purchase of individual and family health insurance
policies. His proposal would also allow insurers to sell policies across
state line, boost incentives for health savings accounts, and create
high-risk pools to help individuals afford coverage, while barring
assistance for nearly all abortions.
Price has emerged as a top advocate of House Speaker
Paul Ryan's plan to transform Medicare from a program that supplies a
defined set of benefits into a "premium support" model that would,
similar to Obamacare, offer subsidies for participants to purchase
health care directly from insurance companies. He also wants the
Medicare eligibility age to rise to 67.
Price also backs, as does Trump, a plan by House
Republicans to sharply cut the Medicaid health program for the poor and
disabled and turn it over to the states to run. Like Trump and most
other Republicans, Price wants federal funding withdrawn from Planned
Parenthood, which has come under attack for its practice of supplying
tissue from aborted fetuses to medical researchers.
If confirmed as Transportation Secretary, Chao would
face many pressing issues, such as how to boost the nation's aging
infrastructure so that it can accommodate population growth and not
become a drag on the economy, modernizing the nation's air traffic
control system, ensuring that new transportation technologies are
adopted in a safe manner and responding to a surge in traffic
fatalities.
After serving in the Bush administration, Chao served
on the board of directors for Bloomberg Philanthropies, run by former
New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. She resigned last year after
learning the organization planned to expand an environmental initiative
to shutter coal-fired power plants.
Almost 90 percent of Kentucky's electricity comes
from coal, and Chao's ties to the organization were used against her
husband, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, during his 2014
re-election campaign.
