Project 2025's EXIM Vision: From Self-Funding Trade Tool to Asymmetrical Warfare Lever
Project 2025 frames the Export-Import Bank as an 'asymmetrical warfare tool' against China, ignoring its current profit-generating, deficit-reducing, job-supporting model. While EXIM already operates effectively, this framing risks tilting its mission toward riskier, geopolitically motivated subsidies that would shift costs onto taxpayers and favor large corporations at the expense of small exporters.
The Export-Import Bank is one of the few federal agencies that actually makes money for the Treasury. Since FY2008 it has operated with a negative subsidy, meaning it earns more in fees and interest than it pays out in defaults. Since 1992 it has sent over $9 billion to the U.S. Treasury to reduce the federal debt. It supports hundreds of thousands of American manufacturing jobs. These are progressive, distributive facts: a public bank that uses the government's favorable credit rating to level the playing field for U.S. exporters without costing taxpayers a dime.
Project 2025's framing — EXIM as 'asymmetrical warfare' — is a double-edged sword. On its face, it acknowledges what progressives have long argued: export credit agencies are instruments of national economic strategy, and the U.S. should not unilaterally disarm while China, with the world's largest ECA system, pours trillions into strategic finance. That part is correct. But the militarized language is a tell. It invites a shift from EXIM's current self-funding, commercially sound model toward a more aggressive posture where geopolitical goals override creditworthiness. That would mean larger subsidies for politically favored sectors — likely aerospace and defense — while smaller exporters and riskier markets get left behind. The result: the same risk shift that plagues other parts of the financial system, socializing losses while privatizing gains.
The alternative is not to 'weaponize' EXIM but to strengthen its core mission: filling gaps private markets won't touch, supporting small and medium exporters, and maintaining a level playing field with foreign ECAs — all while preserving the negative subsidy model that has kept it fiscally responsible. That means fully funding the bank, staffing it to prevent future quorum paralysis, and tying any expanded lending capacity to climate-friendly and domestically job-creating projects. The goal should be economic resilience and broad-based job growth, not a carte blanche to underwrite corporate risk in the name of great-power competition.
The humanitarian alternative
Strengthen EXIM as a publicly accountable, fiscally self-sustaining bank that prioritizes small- and medium-sized exporters, climate-friendly projects, and domestic job creation, rather than a weaponized tool for geopolitical competition that risks socializing losses.
Grounded in
Original source — excerpted
project2025 Project 2025 ch. 25: Small Business Administration (pp 760-762)"— 727 — Export-Import Bank l When EXIM enters a deal, the American taxpayer is always protected first. If a deal goes into default, the U.S. taxpayer is paid back before any other lender. l Borrowers are loathe to default on the United States of America. This ability to manage risk successfully is why EXIM actually makes a profit for American taxpayers, described in government parlance as “negative subsidy,” sending more than $9 billion to the U.S. Treasury for debt reduction since 1992. The bank has also supported hundreds of thousands of U.S. jobs, most of them in manufacturing, during the past decade. Export credit financing has become a critical lever for macroeconomic growth for many countries, allies and competitors of the U.S. alike. Other nations are using ECAs strategically to influence decisions and procure economic opportunities, hindering the participation of U.S. firms and costing American jobs, particularly in manufacturing. China’s aggressive actions in export finance bleed beyond economic advance- ment and are clearly an effort to expand both its national security and its global power. The United States would be foolish to abandon this field of play, …"