National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2016

Floor Speech

Mr. COONS. Mr. President, I have come to the floor today following on
the speech just delivered by Senator Boxer, who highlighted her concern
about a manufactured crisis--the impending expiration of the highway
bill, which must be reauthorized by July 31. I come to speak to another
manufactured crisis. We have to reauthorize the Export-Import Bank by
June 30 or face the loss of its support for vital jobs in our economy
that will happen with its expiration.

I am a big advocate for manufacturing here in the Senate and in my
home State of Delaware, but I am not a big fan of manufactured crises.
Both of these are unneeded, self-inflicted wounds that will create
further drag on our economic recovery. I think we can and should find
ways to work together across the aisle to reauthorize the Export-Import
Bank.

For more than 80 years, the Export-Import Bank, commonly known as Ex-
Im, has served as a vital tool to help American companies sell their
goods around the world. By making loan guarantees and providing risk
insurance and other financial products to American firms at market
prices, the Bank has helped to ensure that American companies and their
workers can compete anywhere in the world and at no cost to the
American taxpayer. I will say that again: at no cost to the American
taxpayer.

The Bank not only pays for itself, but it actually often runs a
surplus. Last year alone, it returned $700 million to the U.S.
Treasury. Today, the Ex-Im Bank helps American businesses sell nearly
$30 billion in goods every single year and supports more than 150,000
American jobs.

The Bank is a government agency, however, and even though it costs
taxpayers nothing and has an undeniably positive impact on our economy
and on job creation, it remains unclear if this Congress will be able
to come together to reauthorize it by June 30 and keep it running.

Unfortunately, some of my colleagues would like to close the Bank,
and they are using arguments I think are unfounded and misguided to do
so.

First, I have heard the Ex-Im Bank is somehow a government giveaway
to large politically connected corporations. But the truth is the Bank
helps companies of many different sizes, large and small.

In my home State of Delaware, for instance, the Ex-Im Bank has helped
a company I know well--Voigt and Schweitzer, a hot-dip zinc galvanizing
company. It has helped them to sell their products abroad. Voigt &
Schweitzer has a few facilities around the United States, in addition
to the one in New Castle, DE. At its Delaware location it provides
galvanizing services for a range of steel products for export. V
isn't a huge corporation. It has just a few dozen employees in
Delaware. It is because of Ex-Im's support that it has been able to
compete with other companies around the globe.

In fact, Ex-Im's support helped the firm's Delaware location earn the
business to galvanize literally hundreds of bridges that were
manufactured in Pennsylvania and being exported and sold to Africa--
business that would have likely gone to competitors overseas without
Ex-Im's help.

Now, Ex-Im does also help large corporations export their goods to
countries around the world, but that support also benefits small and
medium- sized businesses. For example, Boeing often receives
significant support from the Ex-Im Bank, which helps it compete with
international airplane manufacturers such as Airbus. I have heard
Senators criticize this support, but the reality is it isn't just
Boeing that benefits. This is an important point about how modern
manufacturing and the integration of the supply chain work.

When Boeing manufactures a finished airplane, it doesn't make all of
the plane's parts with its own factories and its own workforce. It, in
fact, buys the vast majority of the component parts from much smaller
manufacturers spread throughout the United States. From the brakes on
the landing gear to the in-flight entertainment system, other companies
make those parts and sell them to Boeing for the finished product. So
when Ex-Im helps Boeing export a 747, it helps sustain tens of
thousands of jobs for American workers at other smaller companies.

I have seen this myself in Delaware. Although Boeing directly employs
in Delaware just 16 people, the company supports 1,300 jobs with 52
different Delaware companies. Let me give one example. A smallish
company, Polymer Technologies, manufactures and sells thermal and
acoustic insulation to Boeing for inclusion in their planes, which are
then exported through the help of Ex-Im.

So when Ex-Im's opponents in this Chamber argue that this is all
about a few big companies, that just isn't true. It also is vital to
sustaining and supporting smaller manufacturers that are vital to our
communities.

The next misplaced argument I have heard is that government shouldn't
be supporting private companies, period. They should not be, as it
were, picking winners and losers. But even to a supporter of the free
market, the point of government is to step in where the private market
fails to do so, and that is exactly what Ex-Im does.

When the Bank makes a loan to a business, it isn't replacing capital
that would otherwise have come from a private bank. It supplements
private capital or makes a private bank more inclined to put at risk
its own capital through provision of political risk insurance. Much of
the time Ex-Im serves as a lender of last resort and provides a loan
where a private bank can't or won't.

So the Export-Import Bank isn't doing something the private sector
should be doing. It is picking up where the market leaves off, and in
doing so it helps to level the global playing field on which American
companies compete.

The reality is that every single one of our trading partners provides
the same type of support for their exports as the Ex-Im Bank does for
ours. So they are picking winners. They are picking American winners on
the global playing field.

For example, as Ex-Im's chairman, Fred Hochberg, has written, ``Ex-Im
has given $590 billion in loans, guarantees, and insurance over its
entire history but Chinese institutions''--Chinese export-financing
institutions--``have provided an estimated $670 billion in just the
past 2 years.''

In other words, China has done more in just 2 years to support the
financing of their exporters than our Export-Import Bank has done in
its entire 80-year history and at no cost to the taxpayer.

The bottom line is that American jobs are at stake in this debate,
and if we fail to keep the doors open to the Export-Import Bank, we
will fail a lot of American workers. Every year, Ex-Im supports
hundreds of thousands of jobs, and shuttering it will put them at risk.

In fact, as the Wall Street Journal reported just this morning,
American companies worry that global competition is ``so cutthroat,''
that they would ``be forced to move manufacturing overseas'' and to
ship American manufacturing jobs out of the United States ``if the Ex-
Im Bank isn't open.''

At a time when our economy is continuing to gain steam and Americans
are going back to work--at a clip of 280,000 new jobs announced just
last month--we need to continue to help American companies compete in
markets around the world. The Ex-Im Bank is central to our
competitiveness and our continued strength at home and abroad. It is
critical that we act together to reauthorize it before the end of June.
So I urge my colleagues to join this effort to help support American
jobs, American manufacturing, and the American middle class.

Mr. President, for more than 20 years, the State Partnership
Program--or SPP--has helped the United States to build closer sustained
relationships with militaries and nations around the world. Although I
will not call it up and make it pending at this moment, I want to take
a few minutes to speak on the floor today about my amendment No. 1474
to the NDAA, an amendment that would significantly strengthen the State
Partnership Program.

First established after the fall of the Soviet Union, the State
Partnership Program was created to help countries transition their
militaries from the Soviet model and enshrine the idea of civilian
control of the military through professional and personal exchanges
with our State National Guard units.

The SPP facilitates cooperation across all aspects of civil military
affairs and, besides military relationships, encourages people-to-
people ties at the State level. I have personally seen the benefits of
this program through the participation of my home State National Guard
in their State partnership with Trinidad and Tobago and the civilian
control that it reinforces.

I have also seen it in farflung parts of the globe, from Liberia to
Senegal to Tunisia on the African continent, where three different
State Partnership Programs are actively at work providing training and
support and resources for the military of those three nations.

The California National Guard, for example, currently has units that
are helping Ukraine to push back against Russian aggression in eastern
Ukraine, leveraging a deep and trusting relationship first established
back in 1993.

Since its creation, the SPP has grown substantially. Today, it
consists of 68 partnerships between U.S. National Guard units and
foreign countries, with the 69th, between Kentucky's National Guard and
the African nation of Djibouti, having just been signed. Djibouti is a
nation that is actually the site of our only substantial military
presence on the continent of Africa, and that State Partnership Program
will help to strengthen, sustain, and reinforce our ongoing and vital
security partnership with Djibouti, a nation that is sandwiched between
Somalia and Yemen, countries currently in chaos and facing significant
threats from Islamic terrorism.

That is just one example of how the State Partnership Program helps
leverage the resources of our National Guard.

Traditionally, the program has needed to be reauthorized every 2
years, so I am happy this year that both the House and Senate have
recognized its value and have decided to work together to permanently
reauthorize it in their respective National Defense Authorization Act.
However, there are a few changes we can make that would add to making
the SPP more transparent, more efficient, and more effective, and that
is what my amendment would do.

First, it would allow the Secretary of Defense to consolidate the
various funding streams for the SPP, which right now come from over a
half dozen different accounts scattered across DOD, which makes it more
difficult to provide meaningful congressional sight. This amendment
would allow the Defense Secretary to combine these funding sources into
one National Guard fund to pay for personnel, training, operations, and
equipment.

Second, my amendment would allow the National Guard to determine its
core competencies and to help combatant commanders determine how best
to leverage the National Guard to serve the needs of a partner country.

Last, my amendment would establish clear and enhanced reporting
requirements so we can better track the annual performance of our units
and make modifications where needed to enhance the program's
effectiveness.

Critically, this amendment would not increase the program's costs at
all. This amendment, which is based on the State Partnership Program
Enhancement Act and currently has 9 Republican and 12 Democratic
Senators, including myself, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina,
Senator Pat Leahy of Vermont, and Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa, enjoys
broad bipartisan support from a wide range of States whose National
Guards have participated and benefited from the State Partnership
Program.

The amendment is enthusiastically supported by the National Guard
Association of the United States, the National Guard Bureau, and the
Adjutants General. It would take important steps to strengthening a
program that is essential to many of our international partnerships,
and I urge my colleagues to support it.

With that, I thank the Chair, and I yield the floor.

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