Project 2025’s Quiet War on the Export-Import Bank: Privatizing Industrial Policy, Exporting Harm
Project 2025 proposes to shrink, commercialize, or effectively eliminate the Export-Import Bank — the U.S. agency that finances exports and competes with China’s state-backed export credit agencies. Without a strong Ex-Im Bank, U.S. workers lose leverage for enforceable labor and environmental standards, while foreign rivals fill the gap with no strings attached.
The Project 2025 vision for the Export-Import Bank, laid out in Chapter 23 (pages 727–729 of the source text), treats the agency as a corporate giveaway to be downsized or privatized. The conservative blueprint calls for eliminating the bank’s ‘double bottom line’ — the statutory requirement to consider environmental and labor impacts — and for drastically shrinking its risk appetite. In a world where China Exim Bank and other state-backed export credit agencies operate with no labor or environmental conditionality, a hollowed-out U.S. Ex-Im Bank would not only cede market share but abandon the leverage to demand enforceable supply-chain standards.
As of this writing, the Trump administration has not formally adopted the Project 2025 playbook on Ex-Im, but the ideological alignment is clear. The administration’s broader trade policy — high tariffs on China combined with weak labor rights enforcement and attacks on union power — signals that it views industrial policy as a tool for capital, not for workers. A weakened Ex-Im Bank would mean fewer American exports tied to high-road labor and environmental standards, and more exports of fossil fuel infrastructure and weapons systems, which the bank currently finances heavily.
The alternative is not just a bigger bank, but a better one: an Ex-Im Bank that uses its financing authority to require meaningful labor protections (wages, safety, collective bargaining) and climate-aligned project criteria, while targeting sectors where U.S. workers can compete on quality and standards, not a race to the bottom. This is the model that labor unions, the AFL-CIO, and groups like Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch have long advocated — a bank that serves as a tool for good jobs at home and decent work abroad, not a subsidy for corporate exporters with no accountability.
The humanitarian alternative
Reauthorize the Export-Import Bank with mandatory ILO-conforming labor rights screening, a climate test that prohibits financing new fossil fuel projects (with a narrow exception for small-scale renewable transitions), and a supply-chain transparency mandate requiring beneficiaries to certify no forced-labor or child-labor in their operations. Tie all financing to enforceable commitments not to interfere with worker organizing. This converts the bank from a corporate subsidy to a genuine tool for raising global labor and environmental standards.
Original source — excerpted
project2025 Project 2025 ch. 23: Export-Import Bank (pp 727-729)"— 694 — Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise Terrorism and Financial Intelligence. Terrorism and Financial Intelligence (TFI) was created in 2004 as part of the larger reorganization of the U.S. government to promote homeland security following the 9 /11 terrorist attacks. TFI is charged with the mission of disrupting international financial support for terrorists, weapons of mass destruction proliferation, narcotics trafficking, money laundering, and other national security threats. It is also responsible for implementing and enforcing economic sanctions programs and supporting the wider law enforcement commu- nity in investigating financial crimes. It is led by the Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence. International Affairs protects and supports U.S. economic prosperity and national security by working to foster the most favorable external environment for sustained employment and economic growth in the United States. The most crucial functions of the Office of International Affairs relate to managing the U.S.–China Strategic Dialogue; representing U.S. interests in the World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF) and other multilate…"