By David Lawder and Ismail Shakil
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. President-elect Donald Trump on Wednesday nominated University of Maryland finance professor Michael Faulkender as deputy U.S. Treasury secretary, returning him to the department where he helped implement a pandemic relief program that kept paychecks flowing to workers idled by COVID-19.
Faulkender served as Treasury’s assistant secretary of economic policy, where he advised then-Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin on economic policy issues. If confirmed as deputy secretary, this role would be expanded to a broad range of other areas, including sanctions policy, financial markets regulation, tax policy and the $28 trillion Treasury debt market.
Trump earlier this month named prominent investor Scott Bessent as his choice for Treasury secretary, a decision that appeared to calm market concerns about Trump’s planned tariffs and tax cuts that could balloon budget deficits.
“Mike is a distinguished Economist and Policy practitioner who will drive our America First Agenda,” Trump said in a post on Truth Social. “He will help Treasury Secretary Nominee Scott Bessent usher in a new Golden Age for the United States by delivering a Great Economic Boom for all Americans.”
At the end of the first Trump administration Faulkender returned to the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business, where has been a finance professor since 2008.
He also has served as the chief economist for two years at the America First Policy Institute, conservative think tank that has helped shape Trump’s policy agenda. Trump has drawn several nominees from the group’s ranks.
During a hearing of Congress’ Joint Economic Committee in March, on the U.S. fiscal situation, Faulkender testified that by January 2021, the U.S. economy was already recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic as a result of Trump administration aid programs, including the $800 billion Paycheck Protection Program, which he helped sell to Congress in 2020.
The program gave grants to small- and mid-sized companies that allowed them to continue paying employees that could not work during the pandemic.
Faulkender said that an additional $2 trillion in COVID-19 aid from the Biden administration approved in 2021 helped fuel inflation and said spending cuts were needed.
Debt growth and rising debt services costs “have the potential to create a bond market failure that would crush our economy and rupture our society,” he said in prepared testimony. “To solve this problem, we must greatly reduce spending and deregulate our economy to bring down inflation, thus bringing down the interest rate that must be paid on our outstanding debt.”
(Reporting by Katharine Jackson and Ismail Shakil; editing by Susan Heavey and Diane Craft)
