Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told the House Financial Services Committee on Sept. 15 that the administration is putting growth first in both domestic policy and international finance.
The remarks were released as prepared for delivery before Chairman French Hill and Ranking Member Maxine Waters. Bessent said the United States had just hosted a G20 finance ministerial in Asheville and used that chairmanship to shrink what he called sprawling multilateral agendas.
“Under President Trump, we are getting back to basics. Growth is the condition on which durable prosperity depends. And our Chair Statement achieved broad agreement on the need to promote it.”
He said economies representing more than two-thirds of global GDP agreed to work on persistent imbalances, financial literacy, sovereign-debt architecture and regulatory modernization. The same discipline, he said, should apply to the IMF and World Bank so they stay closer to their original mandates.
On the home front, Bessent argued the country had reversed a period of high inflation. He said the private sector had created more than 1 million jobs under President Trump, that real wages were outpacing prices, and that the lowest-paid quarter of workers were seeing larger wage gains than those at the top.
He pointed to the Working Families Tax Cuts. Over 64 million returns, he said, claimed at least one of the new provisions: no tax on tips, no tax on overtime, no tax on American car-loan interest, and a larger deduction for lower- and middle-income seniors. Through Tax Day, he said families received more than $325 billion in refunds. More than 40 million families claimed a permanently doubled Child Tax Credit. He said blocking the law would have produced a tax increase of more than $5 trillion.
Manufacturing, in his account, has grown for eight straight months through August. Business activity, he said, is at a 52-month high, and the Atlanta Fed’s nowcast puts third-quarter GDP growth above 4 percent.
Bessent closed on national security finance. “Finally, the strength of our economy has allowed the United States to wage the greatest economic isolation campaign in the history of the world against the Islamic Republic of Iran and its enablers.”
“President Trump has taken action that his predecessors have long deferred against a regime that devotes itself to ‘Death to America’ and seeks nuclear weapons to do just that. Under his leadership, America is no longer managing the Iranian threat. We are ending it.”
He said growth abroad, prosperity at home and pressure on adversaries rest on the same goal: American strength in service of the American people. The hearing then moved to questions.
