US President-elect Donald Trump on Tuesday picked Robert lighthizer, a former trade official under President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, as the US Trade Representative (USTR), Trump’s transition team announced.
lighthizer, deputy USTR during the Reagan administration, played a major role in developing trade policy for the administration and “negotiating roughly two dozen bilateral international agreements on a variety of topics from steel to grain”, the transition team said in a statement, Xinhua reported.
In his new role, lighthizer will work with Wilbur Ross, Trump’s pick for commerce secretary, and Peter Navarro, head of the newly created National Trade Council at the White House, “to develop and implement policies that shrink our trade deficit, expand economic growth, strengthen our manufacturing base and help stop the exodus of jobs from our shores,” the statement said.