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The Senate Banking Committee on Tuesday rejected President Trump's nominee to lead the Export-Import Bank.

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Peter Burgess

Senate panel rejects Trump's nominee to lead Ex-Im Bank



Privacy Policy | Terms of Use 00:1300:46 Senate panel rejects Trump's nominee to lead Ex-Im Bank TheHill.com Autoplay: On | Off

The Senate Banking Committee on Tuesday rejected President Trump's nominee to lead the Export-Import Bank.

The panel in a 10-13 vote declined to advance the nomination of Scott Garrett, a former Republican congressman from New Jersey.

Two Republicans — Sens. Mike Rounds (S.D.) and Tim Scott (S.C.) — joined Democrats in opposing the nominee.

Garrett's nomination proved deeply controversial with the committee, and his chances of surviving a vote by the panel seemed to shrink last week when Rounds announced he would oppose him.

But the White House refused to pull his name from consideration.

'We are disappointed that the Senate Banking Committee missed this opportunity to get the Export Import Bank fully functioning again,' White House legislative affairs director Marc Short said in a statement.

Short said the White House will 'work with the committee on a path forward.'

At his confirmation hearing last month, senators from both parties grilled Garrett over his push to disband the Ex-Im Bank as a member of Congress. They questioned whether his views had changed and asked why he should be allowed to lead the agency now.

Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio, the top Democrat on the panel, on Tuesday said senators from both parties left that Nov. 1 hearing without any concrete proof that Garrett had actually changed his mind about Ex-Im.

Garrett vowed that he would let the bank “continue to fully operate,” but many of the senators appeared unconvinced.

Meanwhile, major business groups in Washington like the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) waged an aggressive campaign against Garrett, accusing him of harboring an ideological agenda for the agency.

“The Senate Banking Committee did right by America’s manufacturing workers today by rejecting Scott Garrett’s nomination,” said NAM President and CEO Jay Timmons.

“This agency, which has supported 1.4 million jobs over the past several years, is too important for manufacturers and our economy to be led by someone who has consistently tried to destroy it,” Timmons said.

Timmons urged the Senate to quickly confirm the other four nominees so the Ex-Im Bank can operate at full strength.

While in the House, Garrett was among the conservatives who persistently tried to shut down the Ex-Im Bank on the grounds that its “crony capitalism” distorts the market to help some of America’s biggest companies.

The Ex-Im Bank lends money to foreign buyers to promote U.S. exports, with Boeing and General Electric the two biggest beneficiaries of the financing.

Rounds said he opposed Garrett's nomination “because I believe he’s a principled man who simply believes in the abolishment of the bank.”

“I think that strong desire on his part to see it abolished as an example of crony capitalism would not have worked in the operation of the bank,” he said during the hearing.

“So while I wish him no ill, I do believe that he was not the right person to be the chairman. I think the other individuals who are here will be reformers. I think they’ll work together to make the bank better and more user-friendly to the vast majority of American businesses who need this economic development tool,” he said.

Rounds said he wants to work with the White House to find a chairman who would work to reform the bank rather than kill it.

The committee on Tuesday approved the four other nominees to serve on the Ex-Im board — Kimberly Reed, Spencer Bachus, Judith Pryor and Claudia Slacik. If they are confirmed by the Senate, that would give Ex-Im a quorum, allowing the agency to approve business deals of greater than $10 million.

The bank has lacked a quorum for nearly two years. The Banking panel under then-Chairman Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) refused to consider President Obama’s nominees for the bank's board.

Brown said that there are $37 billion worth of deals in the Ex-Im pipeline over $10 million. About $8 billion to $10 billion of those could potentially be approved within a month, he said.

- This story was updated at 11:26 a.m. Jordan Fabian contributed.