Trump Adds Economists, Private Equity Chief to Transition Team

President-elect Donald Trump on Monday announced the addition of four transition team members who will help shape the Treasury Department under the next administration. Here’s what we know about the new additions.

William Walton

Walton is chairman of Rappahannock Ventures LLC, a Washington, Va.-based private equity firm. He is also vice president of the right-leaning Council for National Policy and a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, a think tank advocating the “intelligent design” theory of human biology.

Walton served as chief executive of Allied Capital Corp. from 1997 to 2009 and as managing director of the private equity firm Butler Capital Corp. He serves on the board of several nonprofit organizations, including the Media Research Center, a conservative group describing itself as “the nation’s premier media watchdog.”

Curtis Dubay

Dubay is a research fellow in tax and economic policy at the Heritage Foundation and a former senior associate at PricewaterhouseCoopers. He previously served as a senior economist at the right-leaning Tax Foundation.

Dubay’s recent work includes an Oct. 31 issue brief on dynamic scoring of the two major presidential candidates’ tax plans. He also wrote a piece in June for the Daily Signal praising the House GOP tax overhaul plan, particularly its business tax proposals.

Judy Shelton

Shelton, an economist who served on Trump’s advisory council during the campaign, is listed as co-director of the free-market Atlas Group’s Sound Money Project. During the 2016 presidential campaign she echoed Trump’s criticism of the Federal Reserve, saying the central bank is politically biased. She has also called for a return to the gold standard. In an August interview with Fortune, Shelton expressed concern about international central banks buying corporate assets.

Her comments during the campaign largely focused on changes to monetary policy, but she does not appear to be looking to turn the central bank upside down, according to a post-election Bloomberg News interview in which she said the Fed “will remain independent.”

Mauricio Claver-Carone 

Claver-Carone, a former Treasury Department lawyer, was most recently the leader of Cuba Democracy Advocates, a Washington-based advocacy group for Cuban-American relations. (Politico reports that he left his position there on Friday.) According to his website, Capitol Hill Cubans, he has also served as the leader “in an independent capacity” of the U.S.-Cuba Democracy PAC, which bills itself as “the largest, single foreign-policy political committee in the United States and the largest Hispanic political committee in history” and supports Cuban trade sanctions.

Claver-Carone previously expressed support for Cuban-American former GOP presidential candidate Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.).