Conservatives hoping to end the Export-Import Bank issued new criticisms of the bank Thursday after news that some of the loans it touted as aiding small businesses really went to some of the biggest businesses in the world.
“Rarely does Ex-Im miss a PR opportunity to claim that it primarily helps small business, but Ex-Im is again playing fast and loose with the facts,” said House Financial Services Committee Chairman Jeb Hensarling in a response to a Reuters report published earlier Thursday that Ex-Im had mischaracterized its support for some small businesses.
“The bulk of Ex-Im’s help indisputably goes to large corporations that can finance their own operations without putting it on the taxpayer balance sheet,” the Texas Republican added. Hensarling has pushed to end Ex-Im, which conservatives describe as corporate welfare.
The bank received a nine-month extension of its charter in September, setting up a fight over its future in the spring.
The investigation published by Reuters found that Ex-Im, which helps U.S. corporations finance export business through loans and guarantees, engaged in transactions worth up to $3 billion over eight years with companies that it said were small businesses, but really were large businesses or parts of conglomerates owned by billionaires such as Warren Buffett or Mexico’s Carlos Slim Helu.
Its support for small business has been one of Ex-Im’s main talking points in defending its charter. The agency acknowledged to Reuters that it had misclassified the businesses.
“Contrary to Ex-Im’s claims, the bulk of its activities aren’t about helping small businesses at all. Rather, the bank prioritizes redistributing wealth to large domestic and foreign corporations,” wrote the libertarian Mercatus Center’s economist Veronique de Rugy in response to Reuters’ report.
“This is yet another reason to end this toxic, corrupt, corporatist institution once and for all when its charter expires in June,” de Rugy added.
Club for Growth President Chris Chocola sought to tie the news into the uproar this week over the recently unearthed comments by Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Jonathan Gruber, widely cited as an architect of Obamacare, that the passage of the healthcare law was enabled by the “stupidity of the American voter” and the “lack of transparency” surrounding the process.
“The Export-Import Bank should be shut down immediately, and members of Congress should look skeptically at anything the bank says about what it does for small businesses — the data may be ‘Grubered,’ ” Chocola said.
