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| Steven Mnuchin amassed a fortune during his 17 years at Goldman Sachs (AP) |
President-elect Donald Trump will nominate former Goldman Sachs banker Steven Mnuchin to be his Treasury Secretary, two sources close to the transition told Fox News late Tuesday.
One source told Fox that a formal announcement of Mnuchin's nomination could come as early as Wednesday.
Mnuchin had long been considered a favorite for the Treasury position. Two weeks ago, businessman and close Trump associate Carl Icahn tweeted that Trump was considering Mnuchin for the post.
Mnuchin, 53, was appointed Trump's campaign finance chair this past May. He previously worked at Goldman Sachs for 17 years, eventually rising to run the firm's technology division.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Mnuchin left Goldman in 2002 and was later hired to run a credit fund set up by liberal billionaire George Soros.
He’s a person of great integrity,” Mnuchin's father, Robert, told the Journal of his son. “[We] expect he will do a good job in this very exciting and demanding position."
Earlier Tuesday, Trump officially nominated Rep. Tom Price, R-Ga., as Health and Human Services Secretary and tapped Elaine Chao, former President George W. Bush's Labor Secretary, to be secretary of transportation.
Price, a former surgeon, supports the repeal of ObamaCare and has offered a replacement that would provide tax credits to subsidize the purchase of individual and family health insurance policies. His proposal would also allow insurers to sell policies across state line, boost incentives for health savings accounts, and create high-risk pools to help individuals afford coverage, while barring assistance for nearly all abortions.
Price has emerged as a top advocate of House Speaker Paul Ryan's plan to transform Medicare from a program that supplies a defined set of benefits into a "premium support" model that would, similar to Obamacare, offer subsidies for participants to purchase health care directly from insurance companies. He also wants the Medicare eligibility age to rise to 67.
Price also backs, as does Trump, a plan by House Republicans to sharply cut the Medicaid health program for the poor and disabled and turn it over to the states to run. Like Trump and most other Republicans, Price wants federal funding withdrawn from Planned Parenthood, which has come under attack for its practice of supplying tissue from aborted fetuses to medical researchers.
If confirmed as Transportation Secretary, Chao would face many pressing issues, such as how to boost the nation's aging infrastructure so that it can accommodate population growth and not become a drag on the economy, modernizing the nation's air traffic control system, ensuring that new transportation technologies are adopted in a safe manner and responding to a surge in traffic fatalities.
After serving in the Bush administration, Chao served on the board of directors for Bloomberg Philanthropies, run by former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. She resigned last year after learning the organization planned to expand an environmental initiative to shutter coal-fired power plants.
Almost 90 percent of Kentucky's electricity comes from coal, and Chao's ties to the organization were used against her husband, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, in his 2014 Senate race.
Fox News and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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