Scott Bessent joins Trump in pushing Fed for lower interest rates

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent urged the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates at its September meeting, aligning himself with President Donald Trump’s crusade for lower rates.

“I think we could go into a series of rate cuts here, starting with a 50 basis point rate cut in September” Bessent told Bloomberg TV , referring to a half-percentage point cut. “If you look at any model, we should probably be 150, 175 basis points lower.”

He suggested that central bank officials might have cut interest rates in June or July if they knew about flagging U.S. employment this summer. A federal report last week indicated the U.S. economy is drastically slowing in job growth with major downgrades for the past two months.

It’s the first time that Bessent has pressured the central bank on setting the cost of borrowing, a chief monetary policy task. The comments put him in a similar league as Trump, who has been more aggressive in demanding steeper interest rate cuts of at least three percentage points. Bessent has previously described the Fed as an “unaccountable agency” and reiterated the same on Wednesday.

Fed officials left interest rates unchanged between 4.25% and 4.5% in its meeting in July, rendering it the fifth time this year borrowing costs were not changed in either direction. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell and other Fed officials have said they want to better gauge the fallout of Trump’s tariffs on the economy before deciding to lower interest rates. A lower cost of borrowing tends to stimulate economic activity through cheaper credit access.

Trump issued a vague threat of a lawsuit against Powell on Tuesday, though it’s not clear whether he had legal grounds to initiate a court challenge. He criticized Powell’s handling of a Fed renovation project that’s attracted scrutiny from Trump allies seeking to build a case to oust the central bank chief.

Bessent also said that there were “10 or 11 people” under consideration to replace Powell, whose term ends next May. “I’m gonna cast a wide net,” he said. “The president’s very open minded.”