Appointments and Executive Changes

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      Kohl’s Picks C.E.O. of Michaels to Help It Turn Around

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      Ashley Buchanan will be the third chief executive of the department store chain since 2018.Kohl’s has hired Ashley Buchanan, chief executive of the crafts retailer Michaels, to be its next chief executive, the department store chain said on Monday. Mr. Buchanan, who has run Michaels since 2020, will start on Jan. 15.Mr. Buchanan will be the third chief executive at Kohl’s since 2018. Tom Kingsbury has served as interim chief executive since Michelle Gass left in December 2022 to run Levi Strauss & Company. Mr. Kingsbury will retain his seat on the board of directors until he retires in May.Mr. Buchanan, 50, is a familiar name in the retail industry. He joined Michaels at the start of 2020, not long before the Covid pandemic forced millions of Americans to stay at home and led them to pick up a hobby. He helped Michaels increase its digital presence with its online marketplace, improved its merchandising and focused on smaller format stores.Previously, Mr. Buchanan spent 13 years at Walmart, holding several senior roles, including chief merchandising officer and chief operating officer for Walmart’s U.S. e-commerce. He was on Macy’s board of directors from October 2021 until Monday, when he resigned as part of his new role at Kohl’s.“I am thrilled to join Kohl’s, a storied and respected brand in the retail industry,” Mr. Buchanan said in a statement. “We have the privilege of serving millions of families all across the country, and I’m excited to work with the teams to evolve our business — building off the strength of our brand and loyal customer base while also creating a compelling retail experience for the future.”Kohl’s is facing a decline in comparable sales and challenges with profitability as customers pull back on discretionary spending. Its tie-up with the beauty retailer Sephora has helped buoy sales by bringing in younger customers. Still, the retailer has said it expects sales for this year to be down 4 to 6 percent.The retailer is set to announce its third-quarter earnings on Tuesday morning. More

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      The Markets Cheer Trump’s Treasury Pick, Scott Bessent

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      Investors seemed to signal their approval for Scott Bessent as a safe choice to implement the president-elect’s economic agenda.Stocks and bonds are gaining on Monday, as investors seem to cheer the pick of Scott Bessent to run the Treasury Department.Dominic Gwinn/Middle East Images/AFP via Getty ImagesA steady hand Stocks and bonds are rising on Monday, and the dollar is down. On the first trading day since Donald Trump chose the billionaire financier Scott Bessent as his pick for Treasury secretary, investors seem to be signaling they like the choice.The hedge fund mogul is seen as a steady hand to enact the president-elect’s economic vision — and, just as important, oversee the $28 trillion Treasuries market. “Investors prefer orthodoxy, predictability, and coherence from economic policy; there were fears that some of the candidates may not possess those attributes. Bessent does,” Paul Donovan, chief economist of UBS Global Wealth Management, wrote in a research note on Monday.The Key Square Group founder overcame serious opposition from some in Trump’s inner circle. Elon Musk derided Bessent as a “business-as-usual choice” and threw his weight behind Howard Lutnick, the C.E.O. of Cantor Fitzgerald. When Trump tapped Lutnick to lead the Commerce Department instead, Bessent was left to fight it out against the likes of Mark Rowan, the boss of Apollo Global Management, the private equity giant.Bessent won a “knife fight” to get the nod. On Wall Street, a document was circulated suggesting that his Key Square hedge fund had underperformed the booming markets. Bessent’s ascent is notable in that he doesn’t appear to have been on Trump’s radar during his first administration.His background as a former Democratic donor who worked with George Soros, a villain for the right, has also been scrutinized. (Interesting fact: Bessent furnished the progressive billionaire financier with key data that prompted Soros to make one of his most famous trades: shorting the British pound.) Some Trump backers, including Palmer Luckey, the defense tech entrepreneur, worried about Bessent’s commitment to the president-elect’s America-first agenda.Investors appear to have fewer qualms. Bessent gets high marks as a fiscal conservative and a champion of growth — at Key Square, he told clients that Trumponomics would usher in an “economic lollapalooza” — through deregulation and lower taxes.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump Cabinet: Inside the Many Ideologies of His Nominees

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      One faction of prospective nominees appears focused on revenge, another on calming markets and a third on relentlessly — perhaps hopelessly — cutting people and budgets.President-elect Donald J. Trump’s final flurry of cabinet picks and other appointments rounded out what his aides described as a unified, loyal, MAGA-driven administration. But scratch the surface and there are at least three distinct factions and a range of ideologies, barely suppressed to get through the rigors of the confirmation process.There is a revenge team, led by prospective nominees with instructions to rip apart the Justice Department, the intelligence agencies and the Defense Department, hunting down the so-called deep state and anyone who participated in the prosecutions of Mr. Trump.There is a calm-the-markets team, which Mr. Trump hopes will be led by Scott Bessent, the Wall Street billionaire who Mr. Trump chose for Treasury secretary. Mr. Bessent can recite the MAGA lines about deregulation and lower taxes but would likely try to make sure Mr. Trump’s most extreme solutions, like inflation-inducing tariffs on foreign goods, do not end the post-election stock market surge.And then there is a government shrinkage team, led by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, whose goals are wildly ambitious, to put it mildly. They want to carve what Mr. Musk says will be “at least” $2 trillion from the annual federal budget, a figure that exceeds the annual cost of salaries for every federal employee. (For the record, the total federal budget in the 2024 fiscal year was $6.75 trillion.)How these missions will mesh and where they will collide is one of the biggest unknowns of the incoming administration.Diversity of ideology and opinion is usually seen as a strength, not a defect, of presidential cabinets. But if there is a surprise about Mr. Trump’s choices in recent days, it is the range of experiences and worldviews that in some cases lie just beneath a veneer of recently declared Make America Great Again loyalty — and loyalty to Mr. Trump himself. It is hard to imagine a few of his picks sitting comfortably at a Trump rally.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump’s Choices for Health Agencies Suggest a Shake-Up Is Coming

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      The picks to oversee public health have all pushed back against Covid policies or supported ideas that are outside the medical mainstream.A longtime leader of the anti-vaccine movement. A highly credentialed surgeon. A seven-term Florida congressman. A Fox News contributor with her own line of vitamins.President-elect Donald J. Trump’s eclectic roster of figures to lead federal health agencies is almost complete — and with it, his vision for a sweeping overhaul is coming into focus.Mr. Trump’s choices have varying backgrounds and public health views. But they have all pushed back against Covid policies or supported ideas that are outside the medical mainstream, including an opposition to vaccines. Together, they are a clear repudiation of business as usual.“What they’re saying when they make these appointments is that we don’t trust the people who are there,” said Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and an adviser to the Food and Drug Administration.Some doctors and scientists are bracing themselves for the gutting of public health agencies, a loss of scientific expertise and the injection of politics into realms once reserved for academics. The result, they fear, could be worse health outcomes, more preventable deaths and a reduced ability to respond to looming health threats, like the next pandemic. “I’m very, very worried about the way that this all plays out,” Dr. Offit said.But other experts who expressed concerns about anti-vaccine views at the helms of the nation’s health agencies said that some elements of the picks’ unorthodox approaches were welcomed. After a pandemic that closed schools across the country and killed more than one million Americans, many people have lost faith in science and medicine, surveys show. And even some prominent public health experts were critical of the agencies’ Covid missteps and muddled messaging on masks and testing.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Elon Musk recibe un curso intensivo sobre cómo funciona el mundo de Donald Trump

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      La persona más rica del mundo, no muy conocida por su humildad, está aprendiendo la despiadada política cortesana del círculo íntimo de Donald Trump, y su influencia final sigue siendo una incógnita.Durante los primeros 53 años de su vida, Elon Musk apenas pasó tiempo con Donald Trump. Luego, a partir de la noche del 5 de noviembre, básicamente no pasó tiempo sin él.Y así, Musk, más que cualquier otro actor clave en la transición presidencial, se encuentra en un entrenamiento intensivo para aprender la política cortesana del círculo íntimo de Trump. Para la persona más rica del mundo —no muy conocida por su humildad o su paciencia— es un reto de ingeniería social mucho más difícil y menos familiar que la fabricación pesada o la ciencia de cohetes.Abundan las dudas sobre si se graduará en 2028 con un título de cuatro años en Trumpismo: en este momento, en Washington y Silicon Valley, es como un juego de salón especular cuánto durará la relación Musk-Trump. La respuesta, como te dirán los asesores descartados del primer mandato de Trump, puede depender de la capacidad de Musk para aplacar al jefe y mantener un perfil relativamente bajo, pero también para apuñalar a un rival cuando llegue el momento.En resumen, cómo jugar a la política en el mundo de Trump.La mayoría de las personas que rodean actualmente a Trump en la transición son ayudantes curtidos en batallas anteriores o amigos personales desde hace décadas. Musk no es ni lo uno ni lo otro. Lo que aporta en cambio son sus 200 millones de seguidores en X y los aproximadamente 200 millones de dólares que gastó para ayudar a elegir a Trump. Ambas cosas han impresionado mucho al presidente electo. Trump, asombrado por la disposición de Musk a despedir al 80 por ciento del personal de X, ha dicho que el multimillonario de la tecnología ayudará a dirigir un Departamento de Eficiencia Gubernamental junto con Vivek Ramaswamy.Musk mostró a Trump y a legisladores republicanos la sala de control antes del lanzamiento de un cohete de SpaceX el martes, en el sur de Texas. Foto de consorcio de Brandon BellWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Stock for Sale by Cabinet Members

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      Trump’s picks for Treasury secretary and commerce secretary both lead Wall Street firms. Here’s what that could mean for their finances and businesses.As President-elect Donald Trump takes an unconventional approach to stocking his cabinet, he’s also embracing one candidate pool that has plenty of precedent: Wall Street chief executives.On Friday, Trump picked Scott Bessent, a top economic adviser and the founder of Key Square Group, a hedge fund, to be his Treasury secretary. He previously tapped Howard Lutnick, the chief executive of the financial services firm Cantor Fitzgerald, for commerce secretary.Executives appointed to government positions are often required to make extensive stock divestitures, so the path from Wall Street to Washington can be particularly complex (while also offering an opportunity to avoid certain taxes).Bessent’s potential departure from Key Square may trigger “key man provisions” that often protect clients of hedge funds if top executives leave. And Lutnick is inextricably linked with Cantor Fitzgerald: He was named its president in 1991 and steered the firm after it was ravaged by the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001.Here is what we know — and don’t know — about how Bessent and Lutnick plan to unwind.Lutnick would leave Cantor Fitzgerald. He said Thursday that, upon Senate confirmation, he would step down from the company and the two firms it spun out: BGC Group, a brokerage firm, and Newmark, a real estate firm.He’d be leaving during BGC’s ambitious push to take on the exchange giant CME Group — likely a reason that BGC’s shares were down 8 percent for the week. Shares of Newmark were up 1 percent.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump Picks Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer for Labor Secretary

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      Lori Chavez-DeRemer, a first-term Republican representative from Oregon who narrowly lost her House seat this month, was chosen on Friday to serve as labor secretary in the coming Trump administration.“Lori has worked tirelessly with both business and labor to build America’s work force, and support the hardworking men and women of America,” President-elect Donald J. Trump said in a statement.A moderate from a swing district that includes parts of Portland, Ms. Chavez-DeRemer, 56, is not a major figure in American labor politics. But she was one of only a few House Republicans to support major pro-union legislation, and she split her district’s union endorsements with her Democratic opponent, Janelle Bynum, earning nods from ironworkers, firefighters and local Teamsters.When the House speaker, Mike Johnson, spoke at a Chavez-DeRemer rally in October, he said, “She’s got more labor union endorsements than any Republican I’ve ever seen in my life.”Labor leaders criticized Mr. Trump’s policies during his first term as president, and at one point in the race this year, he praised Elon Musk for a willingness to fire workers who go on strike. But Mr. Trump also proposed ending taxes on tips and overtime, and many rank-and-file union members embraced his pro-tariffs economic agenda.After Ms. Chavez-DeRemer’s defeat this month, the president of the Teamsters, Sean O’Brien, urged Mr. Trump to consider her for the labor secretary role, Politico reported. On Friday, Mr. O’Brien praised her selection, posting a photograph on X of himself standing with Mr. Trump and Ms. Chavez-DeRemer.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Dr Martin Makary Chosen to Head the FDA

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      President-elect Donald J. Trump announced on Friday that he would nominate Dr. Martin A. Makary, a Johns Hopkins University surgeon with a contrarian streak, to be commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration.In a post on social media, Mr. Trump said: “F.D.A. has lost the trust of Americans and lost sight of its primary goal as a regulator.” He said that Dr. Makary would work under Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the president-elect’s choice for the cabinet-level role as health secretary, to “properly evaluate harmful chemicals poisoning our nation’s food supply and drugs.”“I am confident that Dr. Makary, having dedicated his career to high-quality, lower-cost care will restore the F.D.A. to the gold standard of scientific research and cut the bureaucratic red tape at the agency to make sure Americans get the medical cures and treatments they deserve,” Mr. Trump said in a statement.Mr. Trump announced two other top health picks on Friday evening as well. He chose Dr. Dave Weldon, a physician and former congressman from Florida, to lead the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.For years, Dr. Weldon championed the notion that thimerosal, a preservative once used widely in vaccines, caused an explosion of autism cases around the world. In 2007, he backed a bill proposing to take vaccine safety research out of the hands of the C.D.C. Health officials reject the idea that research shows any link between thimerosal and autism.Mr. Trump also put forward Dr. Janette Nesheiwat, a physician and Fox News contributor, to be surgeon general. She worked caring for patients after Hurricane Katrina, an announcement from Mr. Trump said, and on the front lines of the Covid pandemic in New York City. She also markets vitamin B and vitamin C dietary supplements.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More