President-elect Donald Trump, whose populist economic message helped carry him to the White House, on Friday named a group of elite business leaders to an economic advisory forum.
The group will include the former chief executive of General Electric, the leader of Boston Consulting Group, and Daniel Yergin, founder of Cambridge Energy Research Associates whose history of the oil business won him the Pulitzer Prize.
The President’s Strategic and Policy Forum will provide input on “how government policy impacts economic growth, job creation, and productivity,” according to a statement from the New York investment firm Blackstone, whose founder and chief executive, Stephen Schwarzman, will chair the 16-person council.
Other participants will include:
■ Yergin, whose company was acquired in 2004 by IHS Energy, which later merged with London-based Markit. Yergin is a vice chairman with IHS Markit.
A Massachusetts native, Welch is an ardent Republican who supported Trump ahead of the election. But he called on Twitter for the party to replace Trump after a 2005 video surfaced in which Trump bragged about kissing and groping women without consent. Welch ran General Electric, which moved from Connecticut to Boston this year, between 1981 and 2001.
Barra, meanwhile, had been considered as a potential vice presidential choice for Trump’s Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, according to internal campaign emails that were made public by Wikileaks.
And Lesser, who lives in New York but whose global consulting firm is based in Boston, donated to the Clinton campaign, according to federal election records.
President Barack Obama has his own Council on Jobs and Competitiveness made up of business leaders who provide him with economic advice. That panel has been chaired by Welch’s successor at General Electric, Jeff Immelt.
Trump’s forum will meet for the first time in early February, shortly after his inauguration. It will meet with Trump “frequently,” the statement said.
Adam Vaccaro can be reached at
[email protected]. Follow him on Twitter at @adamtvaccaro.