House Financial Services Committee Chairman Jeb Hensarling (R-TX) and Ranking Member Maxine Waters (D-CA) are at odds over the presidential nomination of the next leader for the Export-Import (Ex-Im) Bank of the United States.
President Donald Trump has named two former GOP congressmen to fill the empty seats on the bank’s five-member board. To lead the bank as president and chairman, Trump selected former U.S. Rep. Scott Garrett of New Jersey, a banker, former member of the Financial Services Committee, a founder of the Freedom Caucus and a public critic of the Ex-Im Bank. Trump’s other selection is former U.S. Rep. Spencer Bachus, an Alabama moderate who served as chairman of the House Financial Services Committee during the Great Recession.
While Bachus’ nomination is being considered a more conventional and safe pick, Garrett’s nomination is turning out to be controversial.
The Ex-Im Bank itself—which provides financing (loans, guarantees and insurance products) to assist the export of American company’s goods and services—is also not without controversy. Members of Congress on both sides of the aisle have called for its termination due to questions about its effectiveness. Generally, Republicans complain the bank is too cozy with big corporations, while Democrats praise it for supporting the U.S. manufacturing industry.
Garrett is on record as calling the Ex-Im Bank a symbol of Washington’s “crony capitalism” and has criticized it numerous times on the House floor. Garrett additionally voted against the bank’s reauthorization twice.
The bank officially is the nation’s independent, self-sustaining credit agency in the Executive Branch that operates as a government corporation. The U.S. Congress has reauthorized the bank until September 2019 and it is in immediate need of some new board members.
“As a member of the Financial Services Committee, which is charged with overseeing and reauthorizing the Ex-Im Bank’s charter, Garrett was among the most rabid opponents of the Ex-Im Bank and its role in leveling the playing field for American exporters,” Waters said yesterday in a statement.
Waters added that before losing his seat in Congress last year, Garrett “frequently mischaracterized the role of the bank” and ignored the Americans whose livelihoods are tied to the bank’s support for U.S. exports.
Calling Garrett a “staunch opponent” of the bank, Waters said he has no business being its president and chairman. Garrett would “destroy Ex-Im from within,” she said, and weaken U.S. manufacturing if allowed to set the bank’s policies and agenda.
Waters made no comment about Bachus in her statement.
Conversely, Hensarling said he “could think of no one more qualified than Scott Garrett and Spencer Bachus to steer the institution towards reform.”
Claiming that the bank’s subsidies to foreign competitors continue to threaten free enterprise in the United States, Hensarling said he is hopeful that both former congressmen “will safeguard taxpayer dollars and put an end to the bank’s well-documented management failures.”
“With Ex-Im so captured by special interests, the president was right to choose principled leaders like these to safeguard the agency against further mission creep, fraud, waste and abuse,” Hensarling said in a separate statement.
The Senate will have the final word on the President’s nominations, which were made April 14.