Energy Considerations for EXIM Reauthorization

Energy has emerged as a strategic focus for EXIM. The bank’s 2019 reauthorization, for instance, required renewable-related exports to account for at least 5 percent of its total financing authority. EXIM has since supported a spectrum of energy deals: In 2024 alone, the bank approved transactions including a $1.6 billion loan for solar and storage mini-grids in Angola, a $98 million loan for engineering studies for small modular reactors in Romania, and a $297 million guarantee for a waste heat plant in Iraq. This momentum has largely persisted despite a leadership transition and a wider strategic shift in the bank’s sectoral focus. In March 2026, Chairman John Jovanovic named “ensuring American energy molecules and technologies reach every corner of the globe” as one of the bank’s four priorities. Notable recent energy transactions include $2 billion in export credit insurance in Egypt for U.S. liquefied natural gas exports, as well as a credit agreement for a nuclear plant in Poland.

Q2: How competitive is EXIM relative to peer ECAs?

A2: EXIM’s own 2025 competitiveness report offers an unsparing assessment that the bank has become “the ECA of last resort.” Nearly two-thirds of U.S. exporters and lenders surveyed in the report rated EXIM as either “far less” or “slightly less” competitive than its major foreign counterparts; the bank’s favorability rating has not exceeded 40 percent since its 2019 reauthorization. Respondents ranked EXIM last among 25 ECAs assessed in both 2023 and 2024, with the bank trailing peers across nearly every category and performing worst on customer service, speed of deal execution, and product offerings. These competitiveness gaps are partially reflected in transaction volumes: In 2024, EXIM’s $5.9 billion in medium- and long-term commitments not only lagged far behind China’s $23.5 billion but also that of ECAs of smaller economies, such as Italy’s $16.9 billion.

Industry stakeholders and analysts generally attribute these competitiveness gaps to institutional shortcomings in agility, capacity, and reliability. Exporters view EXIM’s U.S. flag shipping requirements and 85 percent domestic content rules as overly rigid for modern supply chains and a key drawback compared to foreign ECAs with less stringent rules. They also cite slow deal approval and execution, inefficient communications, and risk aversion exacerbated by a statutory stop-work requirement if the default rate cap is breached. At the same time, EXIM’s limited product offerings, insufficient sector expertise, understaffing, and weak interagency coordination make it difficult to match competitors that offer integrated, full-service packages—an especially important advantage for energy and infrastructure projects that require varied support across the development life cycle. Similarly, critics have highlighted recurring uncertainty surrounding EXIM’s comparatively short authorization periods and frequent political transitions as a liability.

Q3: What is the legislative state of play?

A3: As with last year’s reauthorization of the Development Finance Corporation (DFC), the annual National Defense Authorization Act is viewed as a likely legislative vehicle for reauthorization. EXIM Chairman Jovanovic has urged Congress to at a minimum pursue a narrow reauthorization that secures the bank’s renewal first before turning to broader reforms. The White House, meanwhile, appears interested in a more ambitious package with an emphasis on priority sectors and signature initiatives. Members of Congress have similarly signaled varying degrees of willingness to balance extension and reform. A bipartisan 10-year reauthorization with minimal reforms was introduced to the Senate Banking Committee early this year, while House Financial Services Committee members have also discussed proposals offering different authorization lengths and changes to the bank’s statutory authorities.

Recent history underscores the stakes. In 2015, EXIM’s authorization was allowed to lapse for five months, a period that overlapped with a nearly four-year lack of a board quorum and severely constrained the bank’s ability to approve large and long-term transactions. These setbacks reduced EXIM’s ability to support U.S. exporters during an expansionary period for global ECAs: A 2024 National Bureau of Economic Research study finds EXIM financing decreased by nearly 85 percent between 2014 and 2019. Firms that had previously relied on EXIM experienced an 18 percent drop in global sales during the shutdown; this in turn led to permanent reductions in capital and employment while producing negative spillovers across affected industries, rather than merely shifting market share among U.S. firms. Crucially, the damage was found to be especially severe for firms that were already highly productive: After losing access to EXIM support, these firms experienced sales losses roughly five times larger than those of their less productive peers.

Q4: What decisions will shape EXIM’s future role for energy?

A4: Aside from threshold decisions regarding whether to reauthorize the bank—or dissolve and transfer its authorities to functionally adjacent agencies—Congress will likely first need to assess how it wants to balance EXIM’s expanding strategic remit with its traditional export promotion role. Lawmakers may differ on whether and how specific export categories should be prioritized while preserving the bank’s support for traditional constituencies. EXIM support for small business exports in FY 2025, for instance, accounted for almost 88 percent of transactions and about 19 percent of total authorizations by value, compared with 23.5 percent for the China and Transformational Exports Program (CTEP), which included “renewable energy, energy efficiency, and energy storage” as a focus area. Whether and how Congress chooses to modify CTEP and codify newer strategic initiatives that have largely been governed by administrative action—including the Make More in America Initiative, the Supply Chain Resiliency Initiative, and Project Vault—could signal how this balance will be struck.

Another crucial decision point concerns EXIM’s institutional capacity. A longer authorization than the seven-year extension enacted in 2019, for instance, could provide greater predictability, especially for energy and infrastructure transactions that take years to structure and close. With a growing transaction pipeline intensifying calls for greater balance sheet capacity, Congress may also revisit the bank’s overall exposure cap. Beyond scale, lawmakers will also need to decide whether EXIM needs a broader product offering—potentially modeled on peer ECAs—to support U.S. firms in complex supply chains and projects with financing needs that span multiple stages of development, which include many energy sector transactions. Operational reforms could be equally important; alongside improvements to process efficiency and customer experience, Congress may also consider providing EXIM greater staffing flexibility and compensation authority to attract and retain talent, as it has done for the DFC.

A related set of questions concerns EXIM’s strategic agility. Congress may raise the 2 percent default rate cap and corresponding stop-work requirement, which is unique to EXIM and which critics argue can deter strategically important but higher-risk transactions. This constraint is a particular hindrance for capital-intensive energy projects: A single nuclear default, for instance, could be enough to breach the cap and trigger a shutdown. To address this risk, lawmakers could also consider expanding existing carveouts for strategic industries, such as by updating CTEP to cover additional technology categories. Another option could involve a separate national-interest account that provides EXIM more flexibility for priority deals while preserving stricter standards for its overall portfolio. Likewise, Congress may also revisit the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Maritime Administration shipping requirements, by which EXIM abides, or direct EXIM to review its domestic content rules. Reforms could consider a more nuanced methodology that accounts for a wider range of factors, rather than relying on the current absolute percentage requirement, or permit goods not exported directly from the United States to the foreign buyer to count toward the domestic content threshold.

Q5: Why does EXIM matter for U.S. energy competitiveness?

A5: Rejuvenating EXIM will be crucial to U.S. competitiveness as ECAs become an increasingly important source of global energy finance. At least 117 ECAs now support exports and economic activity worldwide by helping to unlock capital for riskier transactions in otherwise creditworthy markets, as well as attractive transactions in riskier markets. Between 2014 and 2023, ECAs operating under the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Arrangement on Officially Supported Export Credits committed nearly $18 billion per year to fuel supply and power generation, with roughly two-thirds flowing to emerging and developing economies. Clean energy has also surpassed fossil fuels as a share of global ECA energy finance, rising from less than 30 percent a decade ago to constitute a majority of commitments since 2021.

This shift is also evident outside the OECD, particularly among Chinese ECAs. After a pandemic-era dip, Chinese export credit activity has steadily recovered: One recent analysis finds that China has outpaced the United States in public energy finance globally by nearly ten to one since 2015. Although China has scaled back the number of large, traditional infrastructure projects, it continues to support such deals while expanding smaller transactions, many of which have been energy projects in riskier emerging markets with untapped potential. The country’s financing footprint has also become more geographically and sectorally diverse, with Chinese state-owned enterprises and private firms alike playing a more active role alongside policy banks and ECAs.

In this context, a more robust and agile EXIM will likely be needed for U.S. exporters to stay competitive. At the same time, the country will also need stronger whole-of-government coordination among institutions with complementary capabilities—including the U.S. Trade and Development Agency, the DFC, the Department of Energy, the Department of Defense’s Office of Strategic Capital, and others—to keep pace with the more integrated financing apparatus of its peers and competitors. EXIM reauthorization therefore presents a rare opportunity not only to strengthen the bank itself, but also to better align U.S. institutional architecture with the country’s evolving strategic ambitions. A measured approach could mark a meaningful step toward turning a fragmented set of government capabilities into a more coherent delivery framework for a wide range of policy objectives.

Ray Cai is an associate fellow in the Energy Security and Climate Change Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.

The author would like to thank Scott Condren and Adam Frost for their feedback.