Scott Bessent Set to Serve Billionaires, Big Banks, and Big Oil as Treasury Secretary

January 16, 2025

Scott Bessent Set to Serve Billionaires, Big Banks, and Big Oil as Treasury Secretary

WASHINGTON - The Senate Finance Committee will hold a confirmation hearing today for Scott Bessent, Donald Trump's nominee to serve as Secretary of the Treasury. Bessent spent his career on Wall Street where he helped garner a $1 billion profit through currency trades that collapsed the British pound. In response, Bartlett Naylor, financial policy advocate, Public Citizenissued the following statement:

"If a misguided Senate confirms him, Scott Bessent must apply the lessons from the 2008 financial crisis and the 2023 regional bank failures: Responsible oversight protects hard-working Americans by deterring reckless banking and taxpayer bailouts. Bessent must oblige the law, not Project 2025's Quixotic libertarian fantasies.

"Bessent has planted a flag calling for renewal of the huge giveaways for the rich that were put in place back in Trump's first term and are set to end in 2025. Instead of more tax giveaways, we need millionaires, billionaires, and big corporations to pay their fair share. And we need a Treasury Secretary committed to ensuring that the IRS is poised to go after wealthy tax cheats. Bessent appears more willing to go to bat for his wealthy investor friends than for everyday Americans.

"At a moment when the insurance industry finds itself at the forefront of the climate crisis, Bessent needs to address the inherent risk climate change poses to global financial markets. Instead, Scott Bessent seems intent on locking in fossil fuel dependence, regardless of the destabilizing impacts this will have on the U.S. economy and financial system. The next Treasury Secretary must be focused on building a clean-energy economy that lowers costs and creates jobs, not adopting policies that help line the pockets of the fossil fuel industry while selling out climate-vulnerable communities."

Check out Public Citizen's Trackeron Trump Appointees' Corporate Conflicts of Interest.

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