https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-expected-pick-cantor-fitzgerald-ceo-howard-lutnick-commerce-secr-rcna180176
WASHINGTON — President-elect Donald Trump said Tuesday that he will nominate key transition adviser and billionaire financial services executive Howard Lutnick to lead the Commerce Department.

"He will lead our Tariff and Trade agenda, with additional direct responsibility for the Office of the United States Trade Representative," Trump said in a statement announcing the pick.

The Cantor Fitzgerald CEO has led and been the public face of Trump’s transition.

It’s not clear yet what his selection for a Cabinet post would mean for his role in the transition going forward.

As co-chair of Trump's transition, Lutnick has been an outspoken advocate for his agenda, including explaining how the president-elect plans to use tariffs once in office. Lutnick is the CEO and chairman of the financial services titan Cantor Fitzgerald. The Commerce Department will play a key role in executing some of Trump's proposed tariffs on goods imported into the United States.

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-picks-dr-oz-serve-cms-administrator-2024-11-19/

WASHINGTON, Nov 19 (Reuters) - U.S. President-elect Donald Trump said on Tuesday that he had chosen television personality and surgeon Dr. Mehmet Oz to serve as administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, a wide-reaching agency with annual spending of $2.6 trillion.

Trump, who endorsed Oz in his unsuccessful run in Pennsylvania for the U.S. Senate in 2022, said he would work closely with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who was nominated to lead the Department of Health and Human Services.

Oz said in a post on social media website X he was looking forward "to serving my country to Make America Healthy Again under" Kennedy's leadership.

Trump said the pair would take on "the illness industrial complex, and all the horrible chronic diseases left in its wake" as well as cutting what he called waste and fraud.
"Our broken Healthcare System harms everyday Americans, and crushes our Country's budget," Trump said in a statement.

The agency runs Medicare, the federal health insurance program for people aged 65 or older and the disabled. The office also oversees Medicaid, the state-based health insurance program for low-income people, which is jointly funded by states and the federal government. The two programs provide health insurance for over 140 million Americans.

It also handles much of the enrollment in income-based government-subsidized health insurance under the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. Trump and other Republicans have previously tried to repeal the law but now say they only seek to overhaul it.

His nomination is less likely to cause negative reaction among pharmaceutical companies than Kennedy's, an outspoken critic of drugmakers, said BMO analyst Evan Seigerman.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/trump-defense-pick-pete-hegseth-denies-sexual-assault-allegation-rcna180535

Apparently, being a moral person is no longer a value for the GOP. In a statement, Hegseth’s attorney said the former Fox News host paid a woman in 2023 who had previously accused him of sexual assault but maintained that the woman lied.

Nov. 18, 2024, 4:54 AM GMT+10
By Alexandra Marquez
Former Fox News host Pete Hegseth’s attorney on Sunday confirmed to NBC News that Hegseth, whom President-elect Donald Trump has named as his candidate for defense secretary, paid a woman an undisclosed amount after she accused him of sexual assault.

“In 2023, Hegseth paid the complainant as part of a civil confidential settlement agreement and maintains his innocence,” Timothy Parlatore, Hegseth’s attorney, said in a statement.

He also denied that the encounter between Hegseth and an unnamed woman, which she alleges happened in 2017, was sexual assault.

Parlatore’s statement comes after The Washington Post on Saturday reported that a friend of Hegseth’s accuser sent a memo to the Trump transition team detailing the allegations.

NBC News has not independently reviewed the memo, but Parlatore confirmed that it is related to an encounter Hegseth and the unnamed woman had in Monterey, California, during a conference of the California Federation of Republican Women.

The Post reported that the memo said the woman was at the conference with her husband and her children and “didn’t remember anything until she was in Hegseth’s hotel room and then stumbling to find her hotel room” on the night in question.

Parlatore denied the allegation, saying, “This is a situation where a consensual encounter occurred and, unfortunately, the woman had to come up with a lie to explain why the woman had not come back to her husband’s room that night.”