The U.S. Senate on Monday (Jan. 25) overwhelmingly approved Biden‘s nominee for Treasury secretary, Janet Yellen, making Yellen officially the first female leader to take the helm of the Treasury Department. At the same Time, several Republican lawmakers sent a letter to Yellen urging her to take a tougher line on China.
The Senate voted 84 to 15 to confirm Yellen, a former Federal Reserve chairman, as Treasury secretary. This is the third cabinet position passed by the Senate in less than a week since the Biden Administration took office.
Last week, the Senate voted to confirm Biden’s nominee Avril Haines as the first female U.S. intelligence director and retired Army General Lloyd Austin as the first African-American defense secretary.
The 15 dissenting votes in Yellen’s confirmation vote were all from Republicans. However, Yellen’s nomination was unanimously approved by the Senate Finance Committee last week.
“The bipartisan support for Yellen’s multiple nominations reflects her amazing wealth of experience and her considerable suitability for the position to meet the economic challenges of our time,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said Monday in a statement on Yellen’s confirmation. (D-NY) said Monday before a vote on Yellen’s nomination.
During her confirmation hearing less than a week ago, Yellen noted that “China is our most important strategic competitor,” but unlike Trump‘s preference for unilateral negotiations and imposing penalties, she emphasized that the U.S. should seek to invest in infrastructure and research and development to strengthen its own economy and work with allies.
Whether to retain the tariffs imposed on China under Trump is one of the biggest challenges facing the Biden administration. Those tariffs have forced China to make some structural changes, but they have also raised the cost of doing business for many U.S. companies. Yellen was not asked if she would keep the measures.
Several Republicans sent a joint letter to Yellen on Monday expressing concern about Yellen’s assessment of the national security risks posed by financial and technological interdependence between the U.S. and China and urging her to take a tough stance on dealing with China’s trade and economic issues.
In the joint letter, four Republicans, including Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT), Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) and Sen. Ben Sasse (R-NE), said “As a key advisor to President Biden on national security issues, it is critical that you be able to demonstrate to Congress that your decision is clearly aware of the threat posed to the United States by the Chinese Communist Party when it comes to the most influential and complex national economic prescriptions.”
“We appreciate your willingness to consider using the economic tools available under Treasury’s delegated authority to combat the malign behavior of the CCP, to work with allies facing similar challenges, and to inject additional resources into our domestic technology sector,” the lawmakers continued in the letter, “however, if we do not commit to using these tools to address economic challenges and technically decouple U.S. financial interests from the Chinese Communist Party, we remain concerned about the strategic consequences of doing so.”
Cotton and Sasse voted against Monday’s confirmation of personnel regarding Yellen. Rubio, meanwhile, was the only senator absent from the vote. Rubio said in a statement Monday that he was unable to attend the vote for some reason, but would have opposed Yellen’s personnel nomination if he could have participated in the vote.
Yellen, 74, served as chief economic adviser during Clinton’s second term in office. The Senate confirmation makes her the first financial leader in U.S. history to have run the three major economic policy-making bodies, the White House Council of Economic Advisers, the central bank and the Treasury Department.
On the other hand, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Monday approved the nomination of Biden’s handpicked choice for secretary of state, John Blinken. The nomination is expected to be voted on by the full Senate on Tuesday at noon.
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