"The cupboard is bare — there are no more cuts to be made" N. Pelosi, 9/22/2013
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Scott Bessent urges IMF to unload swanky Maryland country club: ‘They can start by selling the golf course’
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on Tuesday urged the International Monetary Fund to sell a swanky country club it owns in Maryland after The Post revealed how its staff qualify for discounted memberships at the posh golf course.
As first reported by The Post, Bessent’s former chief of staff Dan Katz was picked last month to become the IMF’s second-in-command as the Trump administration plans a shakeup of the global lender, which has long been accused of running a bloated bureaucracy staffed by high-paid paper pushers.
On Tuesday, Bessent exclusively told The Post that Katz may demand that the Bretton Woods Recreation Center go on the block as part of a cost-cutting program.
“They can start by selling the golf course,” Bessent said of the resort, which charges regular customers between $12,000 and $20,000 in initiation fees that are waived for bureaucrats of both bodies. “I don’t think (President Trump) knows about it. I don’t think he would be happy about it.”
The Treasury Secretary said the current commander-in-chief wants officials at the global financial firefighter “to go back to their core mission,” which he said is “providing liquidity, providing backstops, and being useful as an intervention when countries are in trouble.”
Bessent has been a staunch critic of the IMF since joining the Trump administration, accusing it of straying from its original mission of economic stability by focusing on woke causes.
He said the IMF should also slam the brakes on its “dalliance in these climate policies or social engineering.”
The Post has approached an IMF spokesperson for comment.
The Post broke the news in December that staff at the IMF and the World Bank enjoyed cut-price membership of the swanky country club in Germantown, Maryland, with stiff initiation fees automatically waived.@brettonwoodsrecreation/Instagram
Katz, a Yale graduate and Goldman Sachs alum, also served in the first Trump administration.
He recently played a key role in thrashing out the US’s economic partnership deal with Ukraine and is seen as one of Bessent’s closest confidantes.
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. [See Greenwich Magazine — Ed]
The former senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, who joined the Treasury Department in January, is now the most senior American at the IMF after being formally confirmed in his new role two weeks ago.
Katz formally took up his new role at the International Monetary Fund earlier this month. He has been described as one of Scott Bessent’s closest confidantes.
Last month, The Post reported 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 Secretary has been very clear that this woke b——t needs to end,” said one DC insider of Katz’s move to the global organization led by Bulgarian economist Kristalina Georgieva.
This newspaper has repeatedly exposed how the World Bank’s bureaucrats enjoy a jet-setting lifestyle while lecturing poorer countries on how to run their economies.
Aside from the Maryland country club, officials at the IMF also enjoy lavish perks virtually unheard of in the private sector, and many people in the countries that take its loans can only dream of.
Stiff initiation fees at the IMF-owned golf course — which range from $12,000 to $20,000 — are automatically waived for all employees on the payroll of the two institutions. They make up 80% of its membership, according to insiders.
Club documents show IMF employees who pick up $162,699 or less pay monthly dues between $142 and $312 a month, with senior IMF executives who earn over that sum asked to fork out $355 a month.