The Hill News

As with many federal programs, the Export-Import (Ex-Im) Bank of the United States began as an economic recovery program in the midst of the Great Depression, created to increase American trade. The premise was simple: foster domestic job growth through extending and guaranteeing loans to and assuming risk to aid international buyers of our exports.
 
Seventy-eight years later, the credit agency has ballooned into a bloated $100-billion bureaucracy that drains and puts taxpayer coffers at risk, creates inequalities in the marketplace and actually harms American companies by helping their foreign competitors through government-funded subsidies. The Ex-Im Bank deserves to be retired now. Unfortunately, Congress is poised to reauthorize the agency and inexplicably raise its lending cap by a stunning 40 percent before its charter expires at the end of May.

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