Howard Lutnick tapped to lead Commerce Department under Trump 2.0

WASHINGTON — President-elect Donald Trump said Tuesday that he’ll nominate billionaire Howard Lutnick, chairman and CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald LP and co-chair of the transition team, to be his commerce secretary as well as top trade adviser.

The move is widely seen as a consolation prize for Lutnick, who is overseeing Trump’s transition team and staffing moves in the new administration. He had lobbied hard for the Treasury role, but encountered pushback from Wall Street, which questioned his expertise.

Lutnick also reportedly rubbed Trump the wrong way with his repeated entreaties. He won the endorsement of Tesla Inc. founder and Trump superfan Elon Musk for Treasury, but that wasn’t enough to sway the president-elect, who hasn’t yet made an announcement for his Treasury pick.

Trump said in a statement that he was “thrilled” to announce Lutnick’s prospective nomination, and that Lutnick would have an expanded role leading Trump’s tariff and trade agenda. That will included direct oversight over the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, Trump said, which is not currently part of the Commerce Department.

Commerce had been seen as a lower-profile position than Treasury, though it’s historically had some influence in economic and trade policy. More than half the department’s annual budget is for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, however.

The current commerce secretary, Gina M. Raimondo, has overseen the rollout of President Joe Biden’s industrial policies, including implementation of the $53 billion semiconductor manufacturing incentives law that backers dubbed the ”CHIPS and Science Act.”

When it comes to the fiscal and economic vision for the second Trump administration, Lutnick is in lockstep with the president-elect, who built and spent most of his career in New York.

Lutnick has championed Trump’s plans to impose blanket tariffs on imports and cut government spending — even pitching fellow billionaire Musk on heading up the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, an outside group that would be aimed at slashing costs. Lutnick has painted himself as key to carrying out the fiscal plans of the new administration.

“It’s me, Elon Musk and Trump are going to figure it out,” Lutnick said of balancing the budget on a podcast this month. “There’s the cost cutting, which is DOGE. And then there’s revenue production, which is Howard, so the economic team.”

Political newcomer

A newcomer to the political world, Lutnick started working at Cantor Fitzgerald in the early 1980s and rose to CEO of the investment bank by 1991. He presided over the company in the wake of the Sept. 11 terror attacks when the firm lost more than 600 employees, including Lutnick’s younger brother.

Lutnick is a relatively new entrant into Trump’s political orbit. While he shelled out about $10.7 million in support of conservative candidates and causes in 2024, according to OpenSecrets.org, as recently as 2016 his political donations at times favored Democrats. That cycle he gave to both Hillary Clinton, then running against Trump, and to Vice President Kamala Harris’ Senate campaign, according to Federal Election Commission filings.

Lutnick started donating to Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer in the mid-1990s and continued to do so on and off until 2021. During the 2020 campaign cycle, his donations increased sharply and shifted to heavily favor Republicans, including Trump.

Since Trump’s victory, Lutnick has pitched himself as integral to carrying out the fiscal and economic vision of the administration that he’s helped staff.

Lutnick enthusiastically endorsed Trump’s plan to impose tariffs to bring in revenue. A 10% baseline tariff would bring in about $1.7 trillion in revenue over a decade, after accounting for the corresponding shrink of the economy, according to the right-leaning Tax Foundation.

“We have this great country. Do you want to come play here? Pay. It’s like joining Costco. You’ve got to pay to come in,” Lutnick said on the podcast. “It’s the best place to be. You should pay to come in.”

He sees selling off land and natural resources, such as lithium and oil, to bring in revenue, and cutting spending as the answer to the rest of the country’s fiscal woes.

“Don’t tax our people. Make money instead,” he said.

Lutnick said he pitched Musk on the idea of creating an office to cut government waste. When pressed for specifics, Lutnick cited ditching unneeded office space and modernizing technology used by government employees.

“They just give them work to push around paper, so if you actually used computers,” he said. “Modernize America. You could easily make these people’s jobs better, more efficient and cut 20% of their time waste because they’re just moving paper around and ridiculous things.”

Democrats have slammed the incoming administration’s rhetoric around cutting wasteful government spending. Entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, who has been tapped to work with Musk to slash spending, has suggested cutting off funding for programs with lapsed authorizations. That would include more than $500 billion in cuts to programs supporting veterans, clean water and law enforcement officers, according to an analysis by Senate Budget Committee Democrats.

Lutnick also backs the idea of building a sovereign wealth fund and has pushed a model that would involve companies with lucrative government contracts handing over equity to the U.S. government. Profits would go toward shoring up the Social Security Trust Fund, which is predicted to exhaust its balances in 2034 without changes to revenue or benefits.

On the same podcast, Lutnick also explored eliminating all income-based taxes and replacing them with a consumption-based value-added tax, though he said he hadn’t studied the idea.

“What happens is because we have the greatest economy in the world, all the money in the world flocks here because there’s no capital gains tax. All factories get built here,” he said. “All our people get employed and they get paid more and more money because there’s no tax on them, so they’re willing to work for a lower price. But then everybody gets employed and it goes up and the whole economy becomes the envy of the world.”