(Bloomberg) -- President-elect Donald Trump selected finance professor Michael Faulkender — who implemented a key pandemic-era relief program during his first presidency — to be the deputy Treasury secretary.
“Mike is a distinguished Economist and Policy practitioner who will drive our America First Agenda,” Trump said in a post on Truth Social on Wednesday. “He will help Treasury Secretary Nominee Scott Bessent usher in a new Golden Age for the United States by delivering a Great Economic Boom for all Americans.”
If confirmed by the Senate, Faulkender would serve as the No. 2 to hedge fund manager Scott Bessent, whom the president-elect selected to be the Treasury chief last month.
Faulkender brings a rare mix of practical experience, advocacy and academic credentials to the position.
Politically, he holds a post at the America First Policy Institute, a key seal of approval for job-seekers in the next Trump administration. His academic work at the University of Maryland has focused on corporate capital structure, liquidity and executive compensation.
He served in the Treasury Department during the first Trump administration, finishing as a Senate-confirmed assistant secretary for economic policy.
In that role, he was directly responsible for implementing the Paycheck Protection Program, an $800 billion forgivable loan initiative that replaced salaries during the coronavirus pandemic. An inspector general’s report later estimated $64 billion was lost to fraud, though other estimates are even higher.
In a paper he co-authored, Faulkender defended the program, finding that the loans saved 14 million jobs — with almost 11 million of those in small businesses.
“Delays, whether due to time spent on refining targeting or fraud mitigation, might have produced a better program in those respects,” the authors wrote. “It also would have resulted in significantly higher unemployment levels.”
But Faulkender has been critical of President Joe Biden’s additional stimulus measures. “The pandemic spending policies of the Biden Administration were totally unnecessary,” he said last year.
In an opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal last year, he urged Congress to scrap the “micromanaging” of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, but require banks maintain greater capital levels. “That would discourage individual banks from taking on excessive risk without making the entire system fragile,” he wrote.
The deputy Treasury secretary can be tasked with making sure operations run smoothly and typically oversees work across all areas of the department, from debt management and financial stability to sanctions and international institutions.
The role also serves as a key link between the Treasury department and other agencies, as well as with Congress and allies abroad.
The deputy is typically the only other official besides the secretary to have oversight over the department’s entire portfolio, ranging from implementing economic bills, addressing potential banking crises and negotiating with global allies.
--With assistance from Gregory Korte and Amara Omeokwe.
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