In just over one hour on Friday evening, President-elect Donald Trump announced nine new appointments on his social media site Truth Social—including Russell Vought, a longtime ally and key figure in Project 2025, who is set to serve as the incoming head of the Office of Management and Budget.
His Friday appointments spree comes as the former president has moved unprecedentedly fast in forming his cabinet and staff. As Caitlin Dewey wrote for Vanity Fair earlier this week, Trump “is defying virtually every norm of presidential transitions, from coordinating with federal agencies to background-checking the candidates for top administration jobs.”
According to reporting from The Washington Post, his transition teams are running the show from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, and they “have yet to set foot inside a single federal office.” Trump has also, per the Post, not yet collaborated with the General Services Administration, an office in charge of handing over control of hundreds of agencies, because the president-elect has not turned in required pledges to follow ethics rules (like personal conflicts of interest).
In addition to Trump’s tap of Vought for the budget office, his Friday night choices spanned roles in finance, health, labor, and national security.
Trump named the billionaire hedge fund manager Scott Bessent to serve as his next treasury secretary. Bessent, who is the founder of the hedge fund Key Square Capital Management and has worked on and off for Soros Fund Management since 1991, backed extending provisions of Trump’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017—which is expected to cost trillions of dollars within the decade since it’s passing, according to AP based on different economic analyses.
United States House Representative Lori Chavez-DeRemer, a first-term Republican from Oregon who narrowly lost her seat this month to Democrat Janelle Bynum, was tapped as the next secretary of the Department of Labor. A moderate from a swing district that includes parts of Portland, Chavez-DeRemer “was one of only a few House Republicans to support major pro-union legislation, and she split her district’s union endorsements” with Bynum, per the New York Times. Teamsters President Sean O’Brien urged Trump to pick the Oregonian representative, according to Politico.
Trump named former Texas state representative and pro football player Scott Turner to lead the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Currently, Turner chairs the Center for Education Opportunity at the America First Policy Institute, a think tank set up by former Trump staffers. During the president-elect’s first term in 2019, Turner headed a council tasked with turning around distressed communities. “The effort won bipartisan praise,” NPR reports, “though critics suggested the wealthy investors getting tax breaks saw more benefit than local residents.”
Trump nominated surgeon and writer Martin Makary to oversee the Food and Drug Administration, the world’s most influential drug regulator. A physician at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Makary will work closely with Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—the president-elect’s pick for Health and Human Services secretary. Per the Times, Makary has “championed the notion that thimerosal, a preservative once used widely in vaccines, caused an explosion of autism cases around the world” despite health officials rejecting “the idea that research shows any link between thimerosal and autism.”
