Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent named Judy Shelton, a former nominee to the Federal Reserve board and a onetime gold-standard enthusiast, as an adviser to counsel him on issues including China’s financial system.
The Treasury Department announced the “key senior appointment” in a release Friday. “Shelton will advise the secretary on currency policy, with a particular focus on evaluating financial conditions in China,” the statement said.
President Donald Trump in his first term nominated Shelton to serve as a Fed governor, but the Senate voted against her nomination. She had told Bloomberg in February that she would be “thrilled to rejoin” Trump’s economic team. She didn’t respond to a request for comment Friday.
Before being nominated by Trump to the Fed, Shelton was known for her support of the gold standard, ultra-hawkish views on inflation and opposition to federal deposit insurance. Shelton has previously worked at the Independent Institute as a senior fellow and before that was at Stanford’s Hoover Institution.
Her new role at the Treasury is the second such appointment in recent weeks, after Bessent tapped longtime market strategies David Zervos as a senior counselor as well. The hirings come amid relatively high turnover in the Treasury’s Senate-confirmed positions. Seven such posts — including the deputy secretary and two undersecretaries, the highest ranks below Bessent’s — have seen departures since early last year, according to an August report from Partnership for Public Service, a nonpartisan government monitoring group.
Since that report, another Senate-confirmed official, Luke Pettit, has also left the department . Petit served as assistant secretary for financial institutions.
Shelton generated controversy during her confirmation process in the first Trump administration by calling for interest-rate cuts to align herself with Trump once she emerged as a candidate for a post at the Fed. She also questioned the efficacy of the Fed’s mandate to maintain price stability and maximum employment. Former Fed officials and a group of prominent economists, including seven Nobel Prize winners, signed letters urging senators to reject her nomination.
Trump has called for lower interest rates set by the Fed even though the central bank raised rates for the first time since 2023 last month.