Trump picks pro-tariff billionaire Howard Lutnick for US commerce secretary

US president-elect nominates Lutnick, a Wall Street investment firm CEO, to lead his ‘tariff and trade agenda’.

United States President-elect Donald Trump has nominated Howard Lutnick, a billionaire and head of the investment firm Cantor Fitzgerald, as the next US secretary of commerce.

In a statement on Tuesday, Trump hailed Lutnick – who has served as co-chair of the Republican’s transition team – as “a dynamic force on Wall Street for more than 30 years”.

“He will lead our Tariff and Trade agenda, with additional direct responsibility for the Office of the United States Trade Representative,” Trump said.

The nomination is the latest from Trump, who has named a growing list of Republican allies and other loyalists to cabinet posts since he won the November 5 presidential election over Democrat Kamala Harris.

As commerce secretary, Lutnick would be in charge of a sprawling cabinet agency that is involved in funding new computer chip factories, imposing trade restrictions, releasing economic data and monitoring the weather.

It is also a position in which connections to CEOs and the wider business community are crucial.

Under President Joe Biden, the Commerce Department stepped up export controls on critical technologies like quantum computing and semiconductor manufacturing goods, taking aim at access by adversaries like Beijing.

Trump’s incoming administration could harden this stance.

The Republican has promised to slap 10- to 20-percent tariffs on all imports as well as a 60-percent tariff on goods coming specifically from China, which the US views as one of its top geopolitical rivals.

Researchers at the Peterson Institute for International Economics said in August that a 20-percent tariff across the board alongside a 60-percent tariff on China “would cost a typical US household in the middle of the income distribution more than $2,600 a year”.

But Trump and his allies have portrayed the tariffs policy as a key plank of his “America First” foreign policy agenda.

Lutnick told CNBC in September that “tariffs are an amazing tool for the president to use – we need to protect the American worker”.

A native of New York City’s Long Island suburbs with a background in trading and real estate, Lutnick has been one of Trump’s top Wall Street advocates, hosting fundraisers and touting his policies in the media.

Speaking at a Trump campaign rally last month at Madison Square Garden in New York City, he said the US has been “letting the rest of the world eat our lunch”.

“And it is time to Make America Great Again,” he shouted.

Earlier in his speech, Lutnick said the first reason to re-elect Trump, however, was “because we must crush jihad”.

Before Tuesday’s nomination, Lutnick had been considered for secretary of the US Treasury, a role that has been at the centre of high-profile jockeying within the Trump world.

Billionaire Elon Musk and others in Trump’s orbit had called on the president-elect to dump the previous frontrunner for treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, in favour of Lutnick.

“Bessent is a business-as-usual choice, whereas [Lutnick] will actually enact change,” Musk wrote in a social media post on Saturday.

Trump has yet to name a treasury secretary, but on Tuesday he also named the television doctor and former Republican Senate candidate for Pennsylvania Mehmet Oz as the administrator for the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

Dr Oz, as he is popularly known, is a Turkish American medical doctor who had a daytime talk show from 2009 to 2022.

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Al Jazeera and news agencies