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understanding of what competitiveness is and how it is achieved and maintained. The Bank should be abolished.

BACKGROUND

The Export-Import Bank was created in 1934 as an export credit agency (ECA) to finance trade with the Soviet Union. It was reorganized as an independent government agency in 1945. President Franklin Roosevelt’s Executive Order 6581 gave it “the power to aid in financing and to facilitate exports and imports and the exchange of commodities between the United States and other Nations or the agencies and nationals thereof” to create jobs in the United States.”

EXIM has four main tools with which to pursue these goals: loan guarantees, working capital guarantees, direct loans, and export-credit insurance. Importantly, for four years starting at the end of 2015, the Bank became incapacitated. Lacking a quorum for its board of directors, it could not extend financing that exceeded $10 million per project. That put an end to about 85 percent of the Bank’s financing obligations. As the numbers below show, the Bank hasn’t yet recovered from that long interruption.

Total Bank authorizations in recent years have gone from $12.6 billion in fiscal year (FY) 2007° to $21.5 billion in FY 2014* to $5.2 billion in FY 2022.° A better way to understand these numbers is to look at the amount of financial exposure the Bank has—that is, the risk the Bank takes for which taxpayers are ultimately responsible. During this same period, the Bank’s total exposure increased from $57.42 billion in FY 2007° to $112.1 billion in FY 2014’ and then fell to $41.3 billion in FY 20218 and $35.4 billion in FY 2022.°

CLAIMS VS. THE FACTS

Supporters of EXIM make many claims about the benefits that our nation and citizens derive from having an Export Credit Agency. These claims, however, are not supported by the facts.

The Bank is an example of government-granted privilege. Traditionally, one of EXIM’s top 10 domestic beneficiaries is Boeing, which at a40 percent share of total loan authorizations dwarfs the 25 percent share for all small businesses that received EXIM’s services combined.” On the foreign side, things are not much different: The subsidized financing largely benefits very large companies like Mexico’s Pemex, Ireland’s Ryanair, and Emirates Airlines that either collect massive subsidies as state-controlled entities or could easily access private financing." American businesses that lack political connections are put at a competitive disadvantage by their own government because they are forced to compete against both domestic and foreign businesses that enjoy access to subsidized loans.”

The Bank does not maintain or create jobs. EXIM’s supporters point to the numbers of new jobs that they claim have been created through federal spending,