Project 2025's EXIM Chapter Rejects 'Weaponizing' the Bank — But Stays Silent on Subsidy Concentration, Domestic Safeguards, and Anti-Money-Laundering Reforms
Project 2025's EXIM chapter actually counsels against weaponizing the bank for China competition, calling such attempts 'going to fail' (p. 724). Yet the proposal omits distributive safeguards: it risks concentrating subsidies among large exporters like Boeing, ignores domestic-content or union-wage conditions, and fails to pair reauthorization with tax or anti-money-laundering reforms. An economic-democracy alternative would require binding small-business set-asides and a financial-transactions tax.
Project 2025's EXIM chapter, authored by Jennifer Hazelton, is not the hawkish escalation the title implies. On page 724, Hazelton writes: 'any attempts to reorient the agency and make it a weapon with which to fight against China are going to fail. Economic fights and national security fights are not won with subsidies.' The chapter instead argues for EXIM as a pragmatic competitive tool for U.S. exporters facing China's three-agency export-credit machine. That distinction matters: the internal conservative debate here is between subsidy-as-weapon (rejected) and subsidy-as-competition-tool (embraced).
But even under the competition-tool frame, the chapter's silence on distributive questions is striking. EXIM's 'Bank of Boeing' pattern—where large firms capture the bulk of financing during credit crunches—goes unaddressed. No domestic-content floor is proposed. No wage or union conditions are tied to EXIM-backed deals. And no fiscal mechanism (tax on benefiting corporations or a financial-transactions tax) ensures public returns on the expanded portfolio. The chapter's omission of anti-money-laundering safeguards is also notable given EXIM's history of facilitating exports to opaque counterparties.
An economic-democracy alternative would reauthorize EXIM with a binding small-business set-aside (at least 40% of direct lending), require all transactions to include a domestic-content floor that increases over time, tie CEO pay-ratio caps to EXIM-backed deals, and fund the expanded portfolio through a modest financial-transactions tax on the very capital markets that EXIM is meant to backstop.
Grounded in
- The U.S. EXIM Bank in an Age of Great Power Competition - CSIS
- EXIM Competitiveness Report 2024
- Review of EXIM's China and Transformational Exports Program
- The Ex-Im Bank: Back in Business - House Financial Services Committee
- U.S. Export-Import Bank Reauthorization Brings Change and ... - Wiley Law
- Why Donald Trump Should Renew the ExIm Bank - Daniel F. Runde
Original source — excerpted
project2025 Project 2025 ch. 25: Small Business Administration (pp 757-759)"— 724 — Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise effectively. Furthermore, any attempts to reorient the agency and make it a weapon with which to fight against China are going to fail. Economic fights and national security fights are not won with subsidies. THE CASE FOR THE EXPORT–IMPORT BANK Jennifer Hazelton I n 1986, President Ronald Reagan signed a bill extending the charter of the Export–Import Bank (EXIM) by an additional six years. In a signing statement attached to the bill, the President declared that “[t]his sends an important signal to both our exporting community and foreign suppliers that American exporters will continue to be able to compete vigorously for business throughout the world.”34 As a candidate for President, Ronald Reagan was opposed to EXIM, but as Pres- ident, he learned the challenges America’s businesses face when competing for opportunities overseas, and his position on EXIM evolved. As President Reagan once famously remarked, “Why would I want our businesses competing with two hands tied behind their backs?” On January 30, 1984, the President said, “Exports create and sustain jobs for millions of American workers and contribute to …"