WASHINGTON – With the help of the federal Export-Import Bank, Phoenix Solutions Co. in Plymouth does 95 percent of its business in foreign sales. That fact leaves company President Douglas Frame to conclude that politicians who now oppose the bank's reauthorization — including his congressman, Erik Paulsen — are out of touch with American small businesses.
Killing Ex-Im, as the bank is known, would not kill Frame's company. "But it would certainly put a dent in our capabilities and would have a ripple effect on people here and backward through our machine shops and material suppliers," he said.
Frame struggles to grasp why after eight decades helping thousands of U.S. companies export hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of products abroad, Ex-Im almost certainly will not be reauthorized before its authorization expires Tuesday.
Republicans in charge of the House and Senate have not yet scheduled votes to keep the bank in business in apparent deference to the party's free-market conservatives and small-government Tea Partyers who oppose it. Without reauthorization Ex-Im will not be able to offer new loan guarantees or insurance for foreign sales beginning July 1.
"You have the ascendance and dominance of more radical forces," congressional expert Norm Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute said. "Practicality is not on the books; ideology is."
This will come as bad news to a number of large and small businesses in Minnesota. Since 2007, Ex-Im Bank has helped 217 companies in the state secure $3 billion in foreign sales, the government said.
Paulsen, John Kline and Tom Emmer, the Republican members of Minnesota's U.S. House delegation, did not respond to Star Tribune requests for comment on Ex-Im's imminent lapse.
The rest of the House and Senate delegation, all Democrats, support reauthorization.