Ex-Im Bank Swears in Leader with New Quorum

Kimberly Reed, an attorney, former food export executive and Treasury Department veteran, was sworn in on Thursday as president and chairman of the Export-Import Bank of the United States, providing a quorum and ending three years of stalemate that hampered bank lending.

The breakthrough came on Wednesday when the Senate voted to confirm her and two other board of directors members, without whom that controversial agency has been unable to provide loans above $10 billion and stabilize its finances.

Also confirmed were former Rep. Spencer Bachus III, R-Ala., and space industry and Overseas Private Investment Corp. executive Judith DelZoppo Pryor. Both were nominated by President Trump in September 2017 but were stalled by ongoing disputes over whether the bank is a needed boost to economic growth or serves as “corporate welfare.” (Bachus and Pryor’s slots remain vacant on the agency’s website, but they will be sworn in later, the bank said.)

Trump’s original earlier nomination of former Rep. Scott Garrett, R-N.J., to be chairman drew senatorial opposition.

 “This is a great day for U.S. exporters, their workers, and their suppliers across the country,” Ambassador Jeffrey Gerrish, the chairman and acting president of the Ex-Im Bank, said after the Senate vote. “EXIM has nearly $40 billion worth of export deals in the pipeline that can move forward in support of hundreds of thousands of American jobs.”

“I am incredibly grateful to President Trump for this opportunity to execute his agenda by growing jobs and helping U.S. businesses prosper,” Reed said after being sworn in. “I am committed to ensuring that American workers can compete on a fair playing field in international trade,” she added, stressing the importance of “freedom, in the form of free-market principles” as the best way to achieve results for U.S. workers, exporters and taxpayers.

Reed most recently served as president of the International Food Information Council Foundation. At Treasury, the West Virginia native headed the Community Development Financial Institutions Fund and also served as senior adviser to Treasury Secretaries John Snow and Henry Paulson. Before that, she held jobs as counsel for the House Ways and Means, the Reform and Oversight, and Education and Workforce committees.

The Senate must still act on two more of Trump’s nominees to the board: technology industry executive Paul Shmotolokha and Ex-Im bank veteran Claudia Slacik.

The bank remains controversial. Obama administration holdover Charles Hall left early from his post as acting chairman in December 2017, warning of a backlog of unprocessed transactions affecting industry.

Eric Fanning, president and CEO of the Aerospace Industries Association, called the Senate votes “a long-awaited step towards putting the bank back in the business of supporting American exporters of all sizes.” Reducing the backlog of $40 billion in unapproved deals, he said, “begins to put American exporters on a level playing field with international competition with active support from their domestic export credit agencies.”

But Doug Norlen, economic policy program director at the nonprofit environmental advocacy group Friends of the Earth, said the new quorum “paves the way for 12 fossil fuel projects in the agency’s queue to progress forward to a board vote — with many more applications for financing likely to come. These dirty projects will result in tens of millions of tons of carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere annually.” He added: “The bank will return to its past practice of supporting projects that damage the global climate, harm community health, violate human rights and hasten corruption.”