Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s Chief of Staff, Dan Katz, is set to leave the Trump administration to join the International Monetary Fund (IMF) as the First Deputy Managing Director, according to three sources familiar with the matter cited by The Post. The move is being described as “a big win” for the president’s America First policies.
Katz, a former senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute who joined the Treasury Department in January, will become the most senior American at the IMF, working under Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva, a Bulgarian economist and ex-EU commissioner, News.Az reports citing foreign media.
“He is one of the secretary’s closest confidantes,” said one insider. “It is a big win for President Trump’s America First economic agenda on the international stage.”
A Treasury spokesperson declined to comment. The Post has approached the IMF for comment.
The Yale graduate and Goldman Sachs alum, who also served in the first Trump administration, played a key role in thrashing out the US’s economic partnership deal with Ukraine and is seen as Bessent’s point man on China.
Katz also has personal ties with the world of global finance: Lord Mervyn King, the former governor of the Bank of England, officiated his wedding ceremony in Riverside, Connecticut, in September 2019.
Katz’s soon-to-be former boss Bessent has recently criticized the IMF for “mission creep” and accused it of promoting woke causes in a speech in downtown DC in April.
He blasted the global lender, set up after World War II, claiming it “devotes disproportionate time and resources to work on climate change, gender, and social issues.”
“Focus on these areas is crowding out its work on critical macroeconomic issues,” he said in the speech at the Institute of International Finance Forum. “The IMF has been whistling past the graveyard.”
There are already signs of some changes at the institution, which is often described as a lender of last resort because it helps bail out debt-laden economies.
Last week, sources told The Post that the Fund’s climate and gender units would no longer operate as standalone divisions inside the body, but would instead be merged into its wider macroeconomic unit.
The changes were first reported by Bloomberg News.
