The Trump Presidency
The ExIm Bank

Former Rep. Scott Garrett (R-N.J.), President Trump's nominee to head the Export-Import Bank ... this ex-congressman may be Trump's weirdest nomination to date

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Peter Burgess

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This ex-congressman may be Trump's weirdest nomination to date


Former Rep. Scott Garrett (R-N.J.), President Trump's nominee to head the Export-Import Bank. (AP/Manuel Balce Ceneta)

Add this to the growing list of White House headaches: President Trump’s pick to lead the Export-Import Bank is hanging by a fraying thread in the Senate.

The nominee — former Rep. Scott Garrett (R-N.J.) — faces a buzz saw of bipartisan resistance thanks to his outspoken efforts while in Congress to dismantle the bank he now seeks to lead. Garrett is making the rounds among senators this week, hoping to tread a narrow path to confirmation by making assurances he’ll help the institution get back up and running while pursuing reforms demanded by conservatives.

By all accounts, it’s been a bumpy performance. Garrett opened a meeting with a number of Senate Democrats on Tuesday by volunteering that he was surprised to have been nominated. Sources familiar with the meeting said it went downhill from there, with the New Jersey Republican declining to say whether if confirmed, he’d advocate for the bank’s reauthorization (it's long been a punching bag of hardline conservatives). By the end of the roughly 45-minute huddle, senators were directing their questions to Garrett’s administration minder, White House legislative affairs chief Marc Short, since he seemed better informed on issues facing the bank, sources briefed on it said. The meeting, Democratic participants said in a joint statement afterward, was “bizarre.”

More consequentially for Garrett, Republican skeptics on the Senate Banking Committee aren't committing to approving him. Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.) met with Garrett on Wednesday and said via statement afterward only that it was a good meeting “and we are continuing to do our due diligence.” Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) — whose state hosts major facilities for Boeing, General Electric and other Ex-Im beneficiaries — likewise reserved judgment after meeting with Garrett. Scott has said the nominee must make a public statement of his support for the bank’s reauthorization, a demand he reaffirmed in a statement Wednesday evening. “My position has not changed,” Scott said. “Mr. Garrett will have that opportunity when he testifies before the Senate Banking Committee, where I will be asking some direct and pointed questions regarding the future of the Bank.”

Scott’s fellow South Carolinian, Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R), has gone further, last month calling on the White House to pull Garrett’s nomination and replace him with somebody more supportive of the bank’s mission. If Rounds and Scott oppose Garrett in committee, assuming Democrats hang together in opposition, Garrett will be defeated. If he manages to surmount that obstacle, things don't look much brighter on the Senate floor -- if Graham opposes him, it would be all over.


Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.). (Alex Holt/The Washington Post)

But Trump officials backing Garrett argue anyone friendlier to the bank would lose even more votes from the GOP’s right flank. “If a traditional, Chamber-of-Commerce candidate were put forward, conservatives would not reauthorize the bank,” one senior administration official tells me. ”The bigger issue is that the bank is something that divides the Republican Party and the conservative movement.”

It’s true that the fight over Garrett cuts to the core of a sharp GOP ideological rift. The bank, which exists to provide credit financing to foreign buyers of American-made products, has existed in happy obscurity for most of the time since its New Deal-era founding.

Five years ago, hard-line conservatives led by Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-Tex.) seized on it because it was small. They’ve aimed to dispatch the bank — and its roughly 450 employees, equivalent to the Office of Surface Mining — as a proxy win in a wider war for free-market purity in the party. “The Bank of Boeing,” as these critics deride it, offers little more than a taxpayer-funded subsidy in the form of loan guarantees to massive corporate interests. Defenders say it provides a critical boost to American manufacturers competing against foreign companies supported by similar facilities in their native countries.

Hensarling, now chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, Garrett and their allies have scored temporary victories. In 2015, its charter lapsed for five months, shutting it down. And the bank has lacked a quorum for months, prohibiting it from approving deals worth more than $10 million (remember: now-ousted White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci was a vice president and senior strategy officer at Ex-Im before he was dispatched from Trump world).

Trump himself has been on both sides of the fight, siding with critics as a candidate, then doing an about-face in April by nominating Garrett in a bid to restore the bank’s quorum -- all while pushing for institutional reforms.

In recent weeks, business groups backing the bank have waged an unusually aggressive campaign to sink Garrett’s nomination in one instance of the divide between them and Trump. The Business Roundtable opposes Garrett:

The Aerospace Industries Association has urged Trump to withdraw the nomination.

And the National Association of Manufacturers has been noisiest of all, launching a series of late-July ads against him in three states and keeping up a drumbeat of opposition within the Beltway:



From the National Association of Manufacturers president and CEO:



In the face of the mounting pushback, administration officials recently considered swapping Garrett’s nomination to serve as the bank’s chairman with a board seat they’ve offered to former Rep. Spencer Bachus (R-Ala.), Hensarling’s predecessor as the top Republican on the House Financial Services panel and a reliable Ex-Im backer. But the senior administration official tells me that the White House remains committed to Garrett.

As one industry source close to the situation frames it, the power to salvage Garrett’s nomination now lies with the nominee alone: “If he can’t figure out how to square the circle here, I don’t see how it happens.”