WASHINGTON — The path Kevin Hassett took as an economist — one that will lead him to the White House again next year as a top adviser to President-elect Donald Trump — was shaped by growing up in the small Western Massachusetts community of Greenfield.
“For the longest time, Greenfield was a thriving mill town,” Hassett, now 62, told senators at the 2017 confirmation hearing for his job as chair of the Council of Economic Advisers in the first Trump administration. “But as we got older, times were changing. Plants closed. Families started moving away. Graduates stopped coming home after college.”
When Hassett began studying economics in college, he said, he kept coming back to the “painful transition” that took place in his hometown of about 18,000 residents and what “policymakers can do to restore prosperity.”
He’ll get another chance to work on that problem in a more influential role next year. Last month, Trump announced Hassett will be director of the White House’s National Economic Council, coordinating policy throughout the administration. The job does not require Senate confirmation.
A mainstream conservative economist who had been an avowed free-trader, the soft-spoken Hassett gained Trump’s trust during his first term despite having advised the campaigns of three of Trump’s least favorite Republicans — George W. Bush, John McCain, and Mitt Romney. He won over Trump by embracing the threat of tariffs on foreign imports as a negotiating tool with other countries, as well as playing a significant role in helping design and pass Trump’s 2017 tax cuts.
All that earned Hassett a return engagement with Trump as one of the few people with deep New England ties to be tapped for his second term.
“He became very close to the president,” said Tomas Philipson, who served on the Council of Economic Advisers with him from 2017 to 2019. “It’s a unique combination he has: He’s very personable, he’s very analytically gifted, and he knows what he’s doing in terms of Washington.”
Hassett built a reputation as a data-driven economist. He even crunched the numbers on a controversy that engulfed his beloved New England Patriots in 2015, coauthoring a 16-page research paper that used mathematical formulas to raise doubts about an NFL investigation that found the team had intentionally deflated footballs.
But his insights haven’t always been correct. Hassett coauthored a book titled “Dow 36,000: The New Strategy for Profiting from the Coming Rise in the Stock Market” that was released in 1999 just before the dot.com stock market crash the following year. And Democrats charge he overstated the economic boost from the 2017 tax cuts, which helped balloon the federal budget deficit.
“He’s certainly a smart enough guy,” said Representative Richard Neal of Springfield, who was a key Democrat working with Hassett and Republicans on the 2017 tax bill. “But I think that over the years that a lot of these folks have gotten the country into trouble with the suggestions that tax cuts pay for themselves.”
Hassett’s new role is different and more expansive than his first-term post. The chair of the Council of Economic Advisers provides the president with research and analysis from what amounts to a White House think tank, said Jason Furman, a Harvard economist who held the position in the Obama administration. The National Economic Council director coordinates economic policy throughout the administration and works with Congress on legislation.
“Historically, he’s been someone who’s very open to reaching out across the political spectrum,” said Furman, citing Hassett’s longtime work at the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute think tank in Washington, D.C. “I think he’s as well suited as anyone for what could potentially be an extremely difficult, if not impossible, job” under Trump.
In his 2021 book, “The Drift: Stopping America’s Slide To Socialism,” Hassett described the difficulties of working for Trump.
“My first six months in the White House were consistent with the idea most people have of the early days of the Trump presidency,” Hassett wrote. “It was chaos.”
As a supporter of free trade, he often clashed with strongly protectionist Trump advisers Peter Navarro and Stephen Miller. After Navarro frequently called him a “globalist [expletive]” in meetings, Hassett wrote that he put a giant globe on his own desk “just to mess with their minds.”
But Hassett underwent what he called an “evolution” on trade while at the White House, particularly when it comes to China.
“I came in as a defender of free trade ... but I learned that our trade deals really had disadvantaged the U.S.,” he wrote. Hassett said he now sees the threat of tariffs as useful leverage to improve those deals.
His ability to survive in the first Trump administration didn’t surprise Lanhee Chen, who got to know him while serving as policy director of Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign. The two later became colleagues at the conservative Hoover Institution think tank in Palo Alto, Calif., and Hassett routinely added a personal touch to their policy conversations, asking about his kids and even offering to give one of them pitching lessons as a longtime Little League coach, Chen said.
“He’s always been somebody who I think has a very kind way about him, and people are predisposed to like him,” Chen said. “I think being director of the NEC is a perfect role for him given his understanding of policy, but also his understanding of [the] policy making process.”
Hassett did not respond to requests for comment. Trump transition spokesman Colton Snedecor said Hassett would continue the work he did for Trump in his first term to improve the US economy.
“Nobody felt the pain of the Biden-Harris Administration’s failing economic policies more than real Americans like the folks in Dr. Hassett’s hometown of Greenfield,” Snedecor said in a written statement.
Greenfield’s industrial focus since Colonial times was producing screws and other metal parts — a process known as tap and die, said Margo Jones, chair of the Greenfield Historical Commission. The small city on the banks of the Connecticut River at one time had the nation’s largest tap and die factory and reached its heights producing munitions and other materials for World War II.
“Unfortunately after World War II, the competitive nature of the industry meant the companies moved south first and they also had overseas competition,” Jones said. Although Greenfield’s industrial base has shrunk, it still is home to small and large metal-working companies, she said.
“A lot of old manufacturing cities are worse off than we are,” Jones said, noting the city has drawn remote technology workers since the pandemic and has become a bedroom community for the college towns of Amherst and Northampton about 20 miles south.
In his 2021 book, Hassett wrote that Greenfield’s history was similar to industrial communities in the so-called rust belt. It inspired him to study how tax policy affected decisions by companies to move away.
A key provisions of the 2017 tax law was reducing the corporate rate to 21 percent from 35 percent to try to prevent US companies from moving to lower-tax countries. But while that change was permanent, the 2017 tax cuts for small businesses and individuals are set to expire at the end of 2025.
Extending and possibly expanding those tax cuts is a top priority of Trump and Republicans next year. Hassett will be a major player in that process, as well as the incoming administration’s possible imposition of higher tariffs on China and other countries that Trump promised during the campaign.
People who know Hassett believe he’s up for the expanded economic role he’ll have in the second Trump term.
“I’ve known and interacted with a number of NEC directors over the years of both parties, and my sense is that he has the ideal mix of experiences coming into it to be successful,” Chen said.
Jim Puzzanghera can be reached at jim.puzzanghera@globe.com. Follow him @JimPuzzanghera.