President-elect Donald J. Trump picked Howard Lutnick to serve as commerce secretary on Tuesday, tapping a billionaire Wall Street executive for one of the most prominent and increasingly powerful economic positions in the federal government.
Mr. Lutnick, the chief executive of the financial services firm Cantor Fitzgerald, has emerged as a central economic adviser to Mr. Trump over the past year and has been leading his transition team. He has called for tariffs to protect U.S. industries from foreign competition, lower corporate taxes and an expansion of American energy production.
Over the past two years, Mr. Lutnick has donated $1 million to Mr. Trump’s super PAC, according to federal election records, and hosted a fund-raiser at his Bridgehampton, N.Y., home that raised $15 million. All told, he donated or raised more than $75 million for groups supporting Mr. Trump in the 2024 cycle, according to someone familiar with his fund-raising who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss nonpublic figures.
Mr. Lutnick has been an ardent defender of Mr. Trump’s plans for imposing tariffs on imports. He has suggested, however, that they should be used to negotiate trade deals with other nations and that goods that the United States does not produce should not necessarily face tariffs.
“Donald Trump is here to protect the American worker,” Mr. Lutnick told CNBC earlier this year.
Mr. Lutnick had been under consideration to serve as Mr. Trump’s Treasury secretary and had garnered support from Elon Musk, who has become an influential adviser to the president-elect.
But the competition for that job has been fierce, with one person describing the battle as a knife fight. Mr. Trump also privately expressed frustration that Mr. Lutnick had been trying to manipulate the transition process.
If confirmed, Mr. Lutnick would join a long line of commerce secretaries who have been chosen from among a president’s biggest donors. But the Commerce Department — which has an $11 billion budget and roughly 51,000 workers — has grown in importance in its own right in recent years.
The agency is the nation’s primary advocate for the commercial interests of U.S. businesses globally. However, it also oversees an increasingly important system of technology restrictions, which bar exports of certain technology, including semiconductors, to China, Russia and elsewhere, for national security reasons.
It is also charged with dispensing tens of billions of dollars of subsidies to U.S. chip manufacturers under the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act, and regulating artificial intelligence. Because of this, it is considered one of the most critical parts of the government in determining whether China or the United States will dominate industries of the future.
Under the current secretary, Gina Raimondo, the Commerce Department has signed preliminary term sheets agreeing to grant many U.S. chip manufacturers money, but it has not disbursed many of the funds. It remains to be seen whether the Trump administration follows through with those plans, or tries to make major changes to that program.
Mr. Lutnick will also inherit an effort by the Biden administration to provide broadband internet access to at least 6.25 million households and locations across the country by 2025.
The department has a sprawling array of other responsibilities and is sometimes jokingly referred to as the “hall closet” of government. Its other roles include counting the U.S. population during the census, overseeing America’s fisheries, forecasting the weather and helping to develop global technological standards.
Bureaus within the department promote American businesses owned by minorities, grant patents and trademarks, and oversee business activity in space. The department also analyzes the world’s oceans and atmosphere, researches the effects of climate change and provides much of the data that the country uses for weather forecasting and severe weather warnings.
In addition to being chief executive of Cantor Fitzgerald, Mr. Lutnick is also chairman of BGC Group Inc., a brokerage and financial technology company, and of Newmark Group, a commercial real estate service provider. He could face questions during the confirmation process about his finances and potential conflicts of interest.
His companies are involved in nearly every sector in the U.S. economy. Newmark Group consults on commercial real estate around the world. Cantor and BGC clients could be affected by a broad array of government policies and regulations, including tariffs, the corporate tax rate, or the Food and Drug Administration’s approval or rejection of new drugs.
Mr. Lutnick, who was orphaned in his teens, made his fortune as a trader of U.S. government bonds on Wall Street. He earned a reputation as a ruthless competitor, battling his mentor as he lay on his deathbed for control of Cantor Fitzgerald.
Mr. Lutnick narrowly escaped death during the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, when he was a young chief executive. The offices of Cantor Fitzgerald were high in the World Trade Center towers, and 658 of the company’s employees, including Mr. Lutnick’s brother, Gary, perished. They represented almost a quarter of the people killed in the attack on New York. Mr. Lutnick, who had taken his son to school that morning, was not at the office.
Almost all of the company’s brokers were at their desks when the flight hit the tower. Even after losing so many brokers, Cantor Fitzgerald was able to stay in business in part because Mr. Lutnick had been pushing an electronic trading system that did not require as much human input. Mr. Lutnick now runs a charity aimed at helping the victims of terrorism and natural disasters.
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