Energy and Water Development and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2016

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. President, I am pleased to join my colleagues Senator Heitkamp of North Dakota and Senator Klobuchar of Minnesota. I represent New Hampshire so I think we have three major regions of the country represented to talk about why we need to make the appointments to allow the Ex-Im Bank to continue to do their transactions.

As my colleagues have said, Ex-Im has a five-member Board of Directors. In order to consider transactions that exceed $10 million, they have to have a quorum--three people. Right now, again, as Senator Klobuchar and Senator Heitkamp explained, there isn't a quorum so they cannot continue to do transactions worth over $10 million. That is having a real impact on companies across this country.

After a period where Ex-Im was not reauthorized in 2016, where they were not able to do business, we finally got that legislation through.

They were able to begin operating again.

In 2016, they were able to support about 52,000 U.S. jobs by authorizing more than $5 billion in transactions--2,000, almost 3,000 export transactions.

At the same time, Ex-Im returned $283.9 million to the U.S. Treasury and maintained a default rate of 0.266 percent. That is a pretty good record, but, by comparison, the last year that Ex-Im was fully operational, they authorized more than $20 billion in almost 4,000 transactions in 2014 when they were fully operational. Those transactions supported 164,000 U.S. jobs and returned $674 million to the Treasury.

So one might ask: What is wrong with this picture? Why is the Senate Banking Committee holding up the person who would allow Ex-Im to continue to operate at its full capacity and allow it to continue to help with job creation?

We have seen this very directly in New Hampshire. New Hampshire is a small State. We are a small business State. Yet we are the State that Ex-Im chose when they rolled out their small business program to help small businesses with the financing they needed to export. One of those first people to take advantage of that program was Boyle Energy Services & Technology. Their CEO, Michael Boyle, says that without Ex- Im, he would have to consider offshoring production in order to continue to grow his business.

Now, BEST does 90 percent of its business overseas, and it relies on Ex-Im for working capital guarantees. They are not doing a lot of transactions over $10 million, but we have a lot of companies in New Hampshire that are doing transactions over $10 million and that are subcontractors to big companies that are doing those transactions. So in New Hampshire, we have General Electric, which is very dependent and needs those exports and that financing. We have a growing aerospace industry that includes companies like New Hampshire Ball Bearings, and it includes companies like Albany Engineered Composites, which worked on the Dreamliner with Boeing.

I talked to the CEO of Albany after he came back from the Paris Air Show a couple of years ago. He said: The people who are getting the jobs, getting the accounts, are the companies that can provide financing around the world.

We make a lot of things in New Hampshire. We have a robust manufacturing industry because we have companies such as Boyle Energy Services & Technology, New Hampshire Ball Bearings, GE, and BAE. Yet we are hamstringing those businesses and their ability to continue to grow jobs, to continue to grow their business because we are not willing to make one appointment to the Ex-Im Bank that would allow us to create jobs in this country and that sends money back to the Treasury.

For all of my colleagues on the other side of the aisle who are so concerned about the fiscal health of this Nation--and I think we share that concern on the Democratic side--why would you not reauthorize and make sure that an agency like the Ex-Im Bank is fully operational, can create jobs, and can return money to the Treasury? It boggles my mind that, because of this ideological battle, we are not willing to do what is practical, what is in the interests of our businesses, of job creation, of making sure that we can compete around the world with other companies that are making things.

So I share the concern we heard from Senator Heitkamp and from Senator Klobuchar, which is that the longer we delay in approving the nomination of Mark McWatters, the longer we delay in making sure that Ex-Im is fully operational, the more jobs will be lost, the more difficult it will be for companies to compete, and the more money that will be lost to the U.S. Treasury.

So I hope that under the new administration there is more of a willingness on the part of my colleagues to actually approve these nominations and to move government forward so that we can create jobs and we can address the economic challenges that too many people in this country are facing.

I yield the floor.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source