NEW YORK: Supporters of the U.S. Export-Import Bank said they would press ahead with legislation to keep the bank alive despite efforts to shut it down.
“The perspective on the other side is not ‘reform Export Import Bank,’ it is ‘kill it,'” said Oklahoma Republican Frank Lucas, whose support for Ex-Im has made him a target for conservatives demanding the bank close. “This is a fight to the political and economic death.”
The export credit agency will shutter on June 30 if its mandate is not renewed, and both supporters and opponents are lobbying hard as the deadline approaches.
Some conservative Republicans say the bank, which provides support for U.S. exporters and buyers of U.S. goods such as Boeing Co planes, provides corporate welfare and is unnecessary.
But supporters say it is vital for many small businesses shut out of commercial financing options by guaranteeing loans and providing export credit insurance.
Ex-Im Chairman Fred Hochberg said he was open to reforms as part of the reauthorization process. However, he added, he had reservations about one provision in a Senate bill, the only one of four proposals before Congress which has bipartisan support.
The bill would overturn limits on financing coal-fired power projects, a policy the White House has said it plans to stick to.
“I can’t agree with that part of the bill,” Hochberg told Reuters. “The president is very clear. We should not use government resources except in the very poorest countries.”
One of the bill’s authors, North Dakota Democrat Heidi Heitkamp, said she hoped the bill would come to the Senate floor soon after assurances from Republican Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, an Ex-Im critic, that he would not prevent a vote.
“We used to have arms races; we are having export races now,” she said at Ex-Im’s annual conference, attended by more than a thousand U.S. businesses, overseas buyers and government representatives.
“Everybody knows now that how you become dominant is you are the dominant economy … the best priced, the highest quality supplier of goods and services in the world.”
