(Bloomberg) -- Maintaining the dollar as the world’s reserve asset is critical to US economic health and the nation’s future, Scott Bessent, Donald Trump’s nominee for Treasury secretary, will tell a Senate committee, according to prepared remarks.
“We must secure supply chains that are vulnerable to strategic competitors, and we must carefully deploy sanctions as part of a whole-of-government approach to address our national security requirements,” Bessent plans to tell senators on the Finance Committee Thursday, according to a spokesman, who shared his prepared testimony. “And critically, we must ensure that the US dollar remains the world’s reserve currency.”
The remarks are Bessent’s first public comments since Trump nominated him in November to lead the Treasury Department, where he’ll play a key role implementing the president-elect’s sweeping economic policy agenda. He’ll appear before the committee at 10:30 a.m. in Washington for his confirmation hearing. With the Senate in Republican hands, he’s expected to be confirmed easily.
Bessent has been a proponent of realigning US currency policy, although he’s stopped short of supporting an overt strategy of depreciating the dollar. During Trump’s first term, the then-president called out dollar appreciation for being harmful to US manufacturers and even considered government intervention to manage the greenback’s value.
The US has faced sanctions fatigue from both allies and adversaries. While dollar rule is deeply entrenched, one bloc of nations including Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa — known collectively as the BRICS — are mounting a challenge to the dollar-based system. While their efforts so far haven’t yielded results, Trump has made maintaining the dollar’s status a tenet of his economic agenda.
“Trump was the first president in modern times to recognize the need to change our trade policy and stand up for American workers,” according to excerpts of Bessent’s prepared testimony. “Productive investment that grows the economy must be prioritized over wasteful spending that drives inflation.”
Bessent will also emphasize the importance of extending Trump’s 2017 tax cuts — some of which expire next year — a cornerstone of the economic agenda the president-elect promised on the campaign trail.
“If Congress fails to act, Americans will face the largest tax increase in history, a crushing $4 trillion tax hike,” he plans to tell lawmakers. “We must make permanent the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act and implement new pro-growth policies to reduce the tax burden on American manufacturers service workers and seniors.”
--With assistance from Joshua Green and Annmarie Hordern.
(Updates with additional Bessent comments starting in seventh paragraph.)
