The background of Scott Bessent, President-elect Trump’s nominee for Treasury Secretary, contains warning signals for fans of Trump and the U.S. economy, in that he worked for George Soros, for whom he was instrumental in the highly profitable 1992 trashing of the pound. For Trump, he must pursue an anti-Soros agenda, sweeping away the remnants of globalism, central planning and wokery in favor of William McKinley’s tariff-driven nationalism and hard-money policy, and Calvin Coolidge’s severe pruning of overgrown government. If at his retirement the Financial Times praises his “moderating influence” he will have utterly failed, subverting the Trump promise and blocking the long-term prosperity which the American people have voted for and deserve.

The Soros link is not one for a Republican to be proud of. Yes, the Soros team’s $1 billion profit from the Bank of England’s sterling devaluation on September 16, 1992, was a great coup, but it was obtained effectively by mugging the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street while she was in a daze facing the utter failure of the policy to which John Major’s government had been fully committed. It’s not NICE to rob the simple-minded, let alone the entirely innocent British taxpayers who ultimately paid the cost of their government’s folly.

My main quarrel with Soros, however, is what he did with the money. He set up a network of Open Society foundations, allegedly devoted to teaching East Europeans about capitalism, but in practice to ensuring that the old Communist politicians could be “laundered” as social democrats and emerge still fully in charge of their unfortunate countries – politician laundering generally does far more damage than money laundering. The first East European leader to understand what was going on was the great Croatian President Franjo Tudjman (1924-2000), who imprisoned the local Open Society representatives in 1998.

Other regional leaders would have to done well to learn from Tudjman’s example; a great deal of poverty and even more corruption could thereby have been avoided. Fortunately, most East European countries were eventually able to break free of the neo-Communist Soros-aided grip, some more fully than others, with Ukraine a notable exception, alas. Soros’ attempt to destabilize law enforcement in major U.S. cities is another entirely separate subversion, sufficing to indicate that any happy memories Bessent may have of Soros’ advice to his youthful self should be severely quashed.

On second thoughts, maybe Bessent should recollect in detail the economic and political approach Soros followed, for it provides a good map of what he will be paid to extirpate. Soros believes that decisions should be made by an elite, ideally separated from any kind of democratic control; he is in this respect a devoted disciple of Klaus Schwab’s World Economic Forum. One of Bessant’s major tasks will be stop funding the international organizations that have done so much to destroy democratic accountability. As Treasury Secretary, he will have direct responsibility for only a few of the U.S. memberships of these bodies – the World Bank and International Monetary Fund and Inter-American Development Bank come to mind – but even leaving these bodies would do much good, reducing both their budgets and credibility. The IMF, headed by the Bulgarian Communist Kristalina Georgieva, is especially damaging to the global economy, since it lends money in large quantities to the wrong countries, with the wrong conditions attached – it was a huge funder of the profligate bloated Argentinian leftist regimes in which Cristina Fernandez was involved, for example.

Outside the financial arena, the Treasury does not have direct responsibility for U.S. membership of international organizations, but it sets the budget for the U.S. to fund them. There are several such organizations whose operations are even more dangerous than those of the IMF, and those should as far as possible be defunded. The International Criminal Court, which has recently disgraced itself, cannot be de-funded because the U.S. is not a member, but sanctions should certainly be imposed on its overstuffed judges and counsel. The most important organization to demolish is of course the United Nations, and most urgently its Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which has been captured by Marxist lunatics and through its annual conferences, threatens to destroy the economies of the Western world. The U.S. should pull out of this body forthwith, and as far as possible wipe it out of existence during Trump’s term, since we should not run the risk of its reasserting control of our lives.

At the other extreme, the World Trade Organization was almost useful once, but has never achieved the position that was hoped at its formation in 1995 and should thus be put out of its misery. International Organizations that outlive their initial role (like the IMF after the fall of Communism, and several League of Nations bodies) are highly dangerous; their bureaucrats, to keep themselves in jobs, seek a new role for them, which inevitably involves establishing new damaging regulations and meddling obtrusively and without democratic mandate in the economies of their members.

In setting and drastically cutting the Federal budget, Bessent will have help from two sources, the Office of Management and Budget head Russell Vought, who has experience at the position and a good track record and, more spectacularly, the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) headed by two of the brightest stars in the Republican firmament, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. The task is gigantic: to avoid tax increases and set the U.S. fiscal position on a firm track for the future, about $2 trillion per annum needs to be cut. Bessent, with a considerable share of the executive authority that can cut it, must develop a process that quickly obtains Congressional approval where necessary and fast-tracks DOGE and OMB recommendations for implementation.

The current U.S. Budget process, set up by the Congressional Budget Act of 1974, is broken beyond repair. Every year that I can remember, the authorized process of budget scrutiny by different committees of the House of Representatives is bypassed, and an “omnibus” bill voted on under threat of closing the government, which funds every boondoggle the left-democrat bureaucrats and activists can think of. Only under Newt Gingrich’s Speakership in 1995-99 was there any kind of control, which was ended by the Republicans in Congress replacing Gingrich with the child molester Dennis Hastert. The current Speaker Mike Johnson is far from being a Gingrich, and the Republican Congressional majority, shrunk by outrageous election fraud in the Western states, is infinitesimal. Hence there is little hope of process improvement from that direction.

The solution is to rewrite the 1974 Act, a product of Watergate hysteria whipped up by the Democrats and the worst elements of the media, which should have been fully replaced decades ago. That Act’s prohibition of Presidential impoundment, which President Nixon used so effectively against the spending lunatics in Congress, must be fully restored. Once that is done, if Congress wishes to pass a “continuing resolution” or “omnibus” boondoggle at the last moment, President Trump can simply impound all the excess spending. More important, he can do so without waiting for the interminable Congressional process to play out. By all means, allow a two-thirds or three-quarters majority of Congress to override a Presidential impoundment, as a safeguard against executive overreach, but the Budget process should revert to that envisaged when the OMB was set up under President Warren G. Harding in 1921, with firm Executive control over the main spending items. Naturally, spending will still run riot under Democrat Presidents, but the public will then know whom to blame for the resulting economic disasters, inflation and likely defaults.

As for taxation, beyond de-sunsetting the provisions of the 2017 legislation that are due to expire in 2025, Bessent should initially do as little as possible. He will of course receive significant additional revenue from tariffs, which will produce a long-overdue rebalancing of budget revenue sources away from direct taxes. Certainly, whines from the corporate sector for further tax reductions should be resisted; big corporations were given too much of the pie in 2017, as the corporate tax rate should have been set at 25% not 21%. Lobbyists seeking abolition of the $10,000 limit on state and local tax deductions should also be resisted; as the 2024 elections have shown (except in California, where elections are stolen) there has been a big swing to Republicans in the overtaxed states, where it is no longer possible to offset excessive local taxes against Federal tax. Of the 50 states, the largest swings to Trump from 2020 came in New York (11 points) and New Jersey (10 points).

On the other hand, as this column has written frequently, if spending cuts fall short or Bessent wishes to make other tax cuts, there can be no better revenue source than abolishing or sharply limiting the charitable tax deduction. Not only is this a grotesque subsidy to the uber-wealthy, it also funds countless “charities” whose principal purpose is to agitate against Republicans, good government and values that promote societal stability. Eliminating this deduction will thus have a triple benefit: of extra revenue, fewer “woke” zillionaires’ social lives subsidized by the rest of us and less agitation for pernicious left-wing causes such as climate change. Winner all round!

Bessent has a lot on his plate, and a chance to achieve much. However, only if he really infuriates George Soros will he attain true greatness!

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(The Bear’s Lair is a weekly column that is intended to appear each Monday, an appropriately gloomy day of the week. Its rationale is that the proportion of “sell” recommendations put out by Wall Street houses remains far below that of “buy” recommendations. Accordingly, investors have an excess of positive information and very little negative information. The column thus takes the ursine view of life and the market, in the hope that it may be usefully different from what investors see elsewhere.)