Wilbur Ross, 78, is the founder of the private equity firm WL Ross & Co.. | Getty Trump to pick billionaire Wilbur Ross as Commerce secretary

President-elect Donald Trump is expected Wednesday to nominate billionaire private-equity investor Wilbur Ross to be his Commerce secretary as part of his roll-out of his economic team.

Trump will pair the news with the announcement that he has tapped former Goldman Sachs executive Steve Mnuchin as Treasury secretary.


Ross, the 78-year-old founder of the private equity firm WL Ross & Co., has been a leading economic adviser to Trump during the campaign, and he is known for restructuring failed companies in distressed sectors like steel, textile and coal. But he also drew criticism for his handling of safety lapses after a 2006 explosion killed a dozen workers at a coal mine one of his companies had acquired in Sago, W.Va.

His appointment as Commerce secretary — long expected after weeks of reports from sources that he was Trump’s choice — would place Ross atop a sprawling department with a wide array of responsibilities, ranging from monitoring the weather and protecting endangered whales to enforcing export rules for goods with military uses. He would also be in charge of implementing U.S. trade laws, on which Trump has advocated a tough line to defend against unfairly priced or subsidized imports from China and other countries.

“If America’s trading partners continue to cheat, a President Trump will use all available means to defend American workers and American manufacturing facilities from such cheating, including tariffs,” Ross wrote in a paper on Trump’s economic plan with economist Peter Navarro, another senior Trump adviser.

Ross added that tariffs will not be used as an endgame but rather “a negotiating tool to encourage our trading partners to cease cheating.”

Ross has degrees from Yale and Harvard and a house just down the street from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Fla. His experience with so-called distressed assets, bankrupted in part by competition from foreign trade, aligns him closely with Trump’s view that countries like China are beating U.S. industry.

Ross' business admirers praise him as the “ king of bankruptcy," calling him a savior of failing U.S. companies. But that savior-like image might not translate for some lawmakers and watchdogs, who say his restructuring of ailing industries has sometimes come at the expense of workers’ safety — as shown in the deadly results at the Sago mine.

He also has a dizzying array of domestic and foreign investments and business dealings, including board positions on at least five major public companies and leadership in private firms. That makes him a complicated choice as the official in charge of promoting U.S. business abroad and defending U.S. trade laws — much as Trump’s worldwide business dealings have already raised complaints about inevitable conflicts of interest.

For example, Ross’ investments in steel place him close to an industry that has waged an aggressive campaign of trade cases against foreign competitors in recent years. That could raise questions over whether he would benefit financially from favorable trade rulings by Commerce’s International Trade Administration.

"He might be the second-most complicated person in the administration to vet, behind the president-elect himself," said Norman Eisen, a Brookings Institution visiting fellow who once served as President Barack Obama's chief ethics lawyer.

Ross would replace Obama's Commerce secretary, Chicago billionaire Penny Pritzker.

Some labor leaders have praised the industrialist for daring to take a chance on companies left for dead.

“I really think the future of domestic manufacturing is people like Wilbur Ross,” Bruce Raynor, the head of the garment workers union Unite Here, said in a 2011 New York Magazine profile of Ross.

Alex Isenstadt contributed to this report.