[Congressional Record Volume 168, Number 56 (Wednesday, March 30, 2022)]
[Senate]
[Pages S1845-S1847]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                  Nomination of Judith DelZoppo Pryor

  Mr. TOOMEY. Mr. President, I rise today to discuss the nomination of 
Judith Pryor to serve as First Vice President of the Ex-Im Bank of the 
United States. Now, the Ex-Im Bank was established to help U.S. 
exporters by providing financing to foreign buyers of U.S. products.
  I have always been very skeptical about the merits of this mission, 
and I remain skeptical to this day. Ex-Im claims that it only takes 
risks that private lenders are unable or unwilling to take. That is a 
central message of the Ex-Im Bank.
  We should stop ourselves right there and ask ourselves a question: If 
private lenders are unwilling or unable to take a particular risk, why 
should taxpayers be forced to take that risk?
  And, at the same time, Ex-Im also claims it only makes safe bets. Mr. 
President, that is a complete contradiction. It is impossible to do 
both. Ex-Im can't only take transactions so risky that no one else will 
do them and, at the same time, only be doing safe transactions. It 
doesn't make any sense at all.
  The fact is, Ex-Im wins business by systematically underpricing risk. 
That is why borrowers go to Ex-Im instead of any number of private 
institutions that wouldn't offer deals on the same terms that Ex-Im 
offers. That is why our largest banks go to Ex-Im for loan guarantees. 
The Ex-Im terms are too good to be true--at least too good to be true 
in the private sector. And that is evident by the kinds of transactions 
that Ex-Im approves.
  Consider just last year: Ex-Im financed a deal guaranteeing an $82 
million loan from JPMorgan to Qantas airline for the purpose of buying 
jets made by General Electric. Now, let's think about this. JPMorgan is 
the largest bank in America, one of the largest banks in the world. 
Qantas is the largest airline in Australia. And General Electric is one 
of the largest industrial companies in the world.

  Why did these companies need the American taxpayer to subsidize a 
deal among the three of them? The obvious answer is they don't. These 
are some of the biggest, most sophisticated companies in the world, and 
they have complete access to global capital markets every day of the 
week. They didn't turn to Ex-Im because they were unable to secure 
private financing. They turned to Ex-Im because they got a better deal 
than they would get in a strictly private transaction.
  Now, as if that isn't galling enough, Ex-Im has now decided that 
American markets can't meet our domestic financing needs--purely 
domestic. I remind you, the U.S. capital markets are the largest, 
deepest, most sophisticated capital markets in the world by far. Anyone 
with a bright idea and a business plan can raise capital in the United 
States. They do it every day.
  According to the Securities and Exchange Commission's Office of Small 
Business Capital Formation report for fiscal year 2021--last year--
there were $2.2 trillion in private offerings of debt and equity and 
$1.7 trillion in initial public offerings and other registered 
securities. So that is almost $4 trillion of capital markets activities 
in the United States. That is how big our capital markets are.

[[Page S1846]]

  And then, separate from that are the banks. According to the Fed, 
there are about $2\1/2\ trillion in outstanding commercial and 
industrial loans as of March 16.
  My point is, the United States is not an economy that is starved of 
capital. It is awash with cash. Nevertheless, despite that, the Biden 
administration has instructed Ex-Im to develop a new Domestic Financing 
Program to expand the reach of the Bank into a whole new direction.
  This proposed Domestic Financing Program would support creating or 
expanding domestic manufacturing businesses and infrastructure projects 
as long as there is some expectation that some arbitrary portion of the 
goods produced will be exported. And this can even include indirect 
exports. So, in other words, an Ex-Im finance manufacturer won't have 
to export a thing if he can claim that his customers will.
  This is unbelievable. This is well beyond mission creep. As George 
Will observed in the Washington Post today, this is ``mission gallop.'' 
And a program like this clearly subverts congressional intent and 
strains--and ``strains'' is a polite way to put the interpretation of 
Ex-Im's charter. And it does so to such an extent, really, I think, to 
make the charter basically meaningless.
  There is no need--there is no reason--for Ex-Im to be providing 
domestic financing, none. As I said, we live in a highly developed 
market economy, like the most developed market economy in the world, 
and promising businesses have access to capital on competitive terms.
  And just like all of Ex-Im's other programs--maybe even more so--the 
only way Ex-Im is going to win business in the domestic financing is if 
it either finances bad deals that the private sector wouldn't touch or 
it underprices the risks so that it is more attractive than the private 
financing.
  So, earlier this month, I sent a letter to Ex-Im's President and 
Board Chair Reta Jo Lewis, and I requested that Ex-Im respond to a 
series of questions I have about this unprecedented new direction the 
administration wants to send the Ex-Im Bank. I also asked to withhold 
Board consideration of this Domestic Financing Program at least until 
there is a comprehensive framework that is published for notice and 
comment.
  Before the Board votes to launch this whole new category of business 
at Ex-Im, shouldn't we all see: How is this program actually going to 
work? How expansive will it be? How expensive will it be? How many 
private lenders will be elbowed aside so that Ex-Im could be doing 
loans private banks would otherwise be doing?
  And none of this has been spelled out. We don't have any answers to 
these important structural questions about this program. Yet my 
understanding is they are going to go ahead and launch this.
  So I sent this letter. Ex-Im responded to my questions, but they 
remained completely silent on my request to withhold Board 
consideration until there has been public discussion and debate about 
the specifics of this framework.
  Only 3 days after I got the Ex-Im response to my questions, they 
noticed a Board of Directors meeting for April 14, at which they intend 
to consider and probably approve this Domestic Financing Program.
  Now, this leads me to the reason that our Democratic colleagues want 
to push Ms. Pryor's nomination through urgently. See, it is my 
understanding that the Ex-Im Board needs at least three Senate-
confirmed nominees in order to change its existing policies--certainly 
a policy as big as this one. Ex-Im only has two Senate-confirmed Board 
members now. So without Ms. Pryor, they couldn't launch this whole new 
program, which is a terrible idea in the first place.
  So that brings me to Ms. Pryor. My concern with her is that she will 
continue to support, first, what I think is the unacceptable practice 
of Ex-Im providing taxpayer-funded subsidies to some of the world's 
largest and most well-capitalized companies, and I fear that she will 
move Ex-Im in the direction of supporting this whole new Domestic 
Financing Program.
  Ms. Pryor has previously served on Ex-Im's Board, and during that 
time the JPMorgan-Qantas-General Electric deal that I mentioned earlier 
was a deal that she supported.
  I asked Ms. Pryor a simple question during her nomination hearing, by 
the way. I said: Do these large, sophisticated American companies have 
access to private capital? She acknowledged that that is a simple 
question, and she refused to answer it. Now, why would she refuse to 
answer such a simple question for which the answer is obvious? It is 
because she didn't want to admit that these giant multinational firms 
obviously do have access to private capital, to alternative financing, 
and she didn't want to acknowledge that, despite that, Ex-Im still did 
the deal.
  I am also concerned about another issue, which is the weakening of 
one of the very few taxpayer protections that is built into Ex-Im's 
charter. The charter includes a 2-percent cap on the permissible 
default rate. So no more than 2 percent of the assets on the books of 
Ex-Im can be in default at any point in time without precluding future 
lending. It puts a brake on Ex-Im expansion if they hit that 2-percent 
threshold.
  Well, guess what? Ex-Im's's default rate has trended toward that 2-
percent cap. It is not quite there yet, but it is getting very close. 
That is why the President's budget requests that Congress temporarily 
waive the cap. Rather than address the problems with Ex-Im's 
deteriorating book of business, Ms. Pryor and the administration 
support this deeply flawed request to just double the statutory 
permissible default rate from 2 percent to 4 percent. How is that good 
for taxpayers? It doesn't sound good to me.
  Congress laid out a clear corrective measure in the event the default 
rate cap is breached. That is, you freeze the book of business. You 
acknowledge something is not going right. We have to fix that problem. 
Is Ex-Im or the Biden administration proposing to fix the problem? No. 
They just want to ignore it and just raise the cap, pretend it is not 
there.
  I will be the first to acknowledge Ms. Pryor is clearly a competent 
person and well-qualified. She has a lot of experience. That is not my 
concern about her candidacy. My concern is that nothing in the entire 
nomination process--nothing in my discussions with her--has alleviated 
my concern that she would advance this badly flawed agenda, which is 
badly flawed in multiple ways, as I have laid out. It is also the case 
that the Biden administration and its supporters need Ms. Pryor now in 
order to advance this Domestic Financing Program.
  For all of these reasons, I cannot support her candidacy, and I 
encourage my colleagues to vote against Ms. Pryor.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Ohio.
  Mr. BROWN. Mr. President, I will be very brief. I know we have an 
11:45 vote scheduled.
  I urge my colleagues to join me in advancing the nomination of Judith 
Pryor as Vice President of the Ex-Im Bank. I appreciate the ranking 
member of the committee's comments about her qualifications. She is 
clearly qualified.
  What we need to always remember is our foreign competitors operate 
more than 100 export credit agencies and credit programs supporting our 
manufacturers. As if our policy has not been stupid enough as a 
country--PNTR with China, which caused the hollowing out of community 
after community in southwest Virginia and in my State and much of the 
area throughout the Midwest--China's export finance activity is larger 
than all of the export credit that G7 countries collectively provide. 
China will continue to use export credit to win manufacturing 
businesses in critical sectors.
  In Ohio, we just lost two more light bulb manufactures, LED 
manufacturers. The light bulb was invented by an Ohioan, Thomas Edison, 
in a New Jersey lab. We used to lead the world. Now, 99 percent of LED 
light bulbs are made in China. Does that not teach us something?
  How about semiconductors? We invented semiconductors. We only make 
about 10 percent of them in the country right now.
  As First Vice President of Ex-Im, Ms. Pryor will help lead the 
Nation's official export credit agency as it supports workers and 
manufacturers throughout our country.
  This is the most pro-worker President of the United States in my 
lifetime. He puts workers at the center of

[[Page S1847]]

our economic agenda, our manufacturing agenda. We know what that means 
for building middle-class lives. More to the issue, the Senate 
previously confirmed Ms. Pryor to be a Board member of Ex-Im in July 
2019, 77 to 19. More recently, she was advanced out of the Banking and 
Housing Committee, which I chair, by a voice vote--12 Republicans, 12 
Democrats--a voice vote. There was no objection, no dissension. The 
Chamber of Commerce--not always an ally of the Biden administration--
the Chamber of Commerce supports Ms. Pryor. She worked with former 
president Kimberly Reed, a Republican appointee; and current member 
Spencer Bachus, a former Republican Congressman, to reopen Ex-Im to 
full operations.
  My interest in her is a national interest. My interest is also that 
she is a native Ohioan. She hails from Richmond Heights, a Cleveland 
suburb, with 25 years of international business, finance, and public 
policy experience.
  Don't be misled by attacks on Ex-Im's creation of a new financing 
facility for U.S. exporters. They already have a quorum. She is not 
essential for that quorum. She is essential because she is so darn good 
in her job. Ex-Im President Reta Jo Lewis is doing exactly what 
Congress--a majority of Congress, not unanimous, but a majority of 
Congress--told the Bank to do when we reauthorized this charter in 
2019: Help American exporters compete with China.
  Our economy--this is almost hard to believe--I mean, it is hard to 
believe--for the first time in 20 years, our economy is growing faster 
than China's economy. That is because we are finally stepping up with a 
real manufacturing policy. We are not asking Congress to waive any 
rules. The Bank is required to show that its financing does not crowd 
out financing from the private sector. It is essential that our 
manufacturers have every tool at their disposal so they can compete 
globally. That is why we need Judith Pryor at Ex-Im. I urge my 
colleagues to join me in supporting Ms. Pryor's nomination.
  I yield the floor.