U.S. President-elect Donald Trump added former Federal Reserve (Fed) Gov. Kevin Warsh and billionaire Marc Rowan to the list of candidates potentially becoming his Treasury secretary, according to reports by the New York Times and Wall Street Journal on Sunday.
Warsh, 54, is a former investment banker who served on the Fed Board from 2006 to 2011. He was seen as a fiscal hawk and a proponent of higher savings rates.
Rowan, 62, co-founded investment manager Apollo Global Management and became the firm’s CEO in 2021.
Republican U.S. Senator Bill Hagerty of Tennessee, 65, who Trump met at Mar-a-Lago last week, is also in the running for the role, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Trump has not announced his nominee for the role, but Howard Lutnick, the CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald, and investor Scott Bessent have been considered as top candidates for the job.
The Republican president-elect has begun to have second thoughts about Lutnick and Bessent, the New York Times said, and was expected to invite candidates to meet with him in Florida at his Mar-a-Lago club this week.
Lutnick co-chaired Trump’s transition effort. A New Yorker like Trump – he has uniformly praised the president-elect’s economic policies, including his backing of tariffs.
Bessent, a key economic adviser to Trump, is a longtime hedge fund investor who taught at Yale University for several years and has a warm relationship with the president-elect.
Billionaire Elon Musk and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. came out in favor of Lutnick on Saturday, making public the internal jockeying on the decision.
The Trump transition team did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
FCC chair
At the same time, Trump has picked Brendan Carr, a critic of the Biden administration's telecom policies and Big Tech, as chairperson of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), he said in a statement on Sunday.
Carr, 45, is currently the top Republican on the FCC, the independent agency that regulates telecommunications.
He has been a harsh critic of the FCC's decision not to finalize nearly $900 million in broadband subsidies for Elon Musk's SpaceX satellite internet unit Starlink, as well as the Commerce Department's $42 billion broadband infrastructure program and President Joe Biden's spectrum policy.
Last week, Carr wrote to Meta's Facebook, Alphabet's Google, Apple and Microsoft saying they had taken steps to censor Americans. Carr said on Sunday the FCC must "restore free speech rights for everyday Americans."
Energy, Commerce secretary roles
Earlier during the weekend Trump also announced that oil and gas industry executive Chris Wright, a staunch defender of fossil fuel use, would be his pick to lead the Department of Energy.
Wright is the founder and CEO of Liberty Energy, an oil field services firm based in Denver. He is expected to support Trump's plan to maximize the production of oil and gas and to seek ways to boost the generation of electricity, demand for which is rising for the first time in decades.
He is also likely to share Trump's opposition to global cooperation in fighting climate change. Wright has called climate change activists alarmist and has likened efforts by Democrats to combat global warming to Soviet-style communism.
"There is no climate crisis, and we're not in the midst of an energy transition, either," Wright said in a video posted to his LinkedIn profile last year.
Wright, who does not have any political experience, has written extensively on the need for more fossil fuel production to lift people out of poverty.
He has stood out among oil and gas executives for his freewheeling style and describes himself as a tech nerd.
While Trump has already made a flurry of picks for his cabinet and other high-ranking administration positions following his election victory, some positions still remain to be filled, including the role of Commerce Secretary.
According to media reports, Linda McMahon, a professional wrestling magnate and former Small Business Administration director, is seen as the frontrunner to lead Trump's Department of Commerce.
McMahon, 76, is a major donor and was an early supporter of the Republican president-elect when he first ran for the White House almost a decade ago. This time, Trump tapped her to co-lead a transition team formed to help vet personnel and draft policy ahead of the Nov. 5 election.
McMahon is the co-founder and former CEO of the professional wrestling franchise WWE. She later served as director of the Small Business Administration, resigning in 2019, and went on to lead a pro-Trump political action committee that supported his 2020 reelection bid.