EXIM Approved a $10 Billion Loan Bigger Than Its Whole Year. Its Charter Runs Out in 174 Days.

The Export-Import Bank of the United States is a wholly owned federal corporation that lends and insures on behalf of American exporters when private banks won't. On February 2, 2026, in the Oval Office, its Board of Directors approved a Direct Loan of up to $10 billion to Project Vault, a public-private critical-minerals reserve — a single transaction larger than everything else the agency financed all of last year combined.▸ The bank's charter is scheduled to expire in less than six months, and Congress has not yet decided whether to renew it.

In fiscal year 2025 — October 2024 through September 2025 — EXIM authorized about 1,300 transactions totaling $8.7 billion, which the agency estimates supported $10.1 billion in U.S. export sales and approximately 40,000 U.S. jobs.▸ That jobs figure is not a headcount; EXIM's own annual report discloses the methodology — an input-output model built from Commerce Department trade data and Bureau of Economic Analysis employment ratios, multiplied against the dollar value of exports financed. About $1.7 billion of FY2025 authorizations, roughly a fifth of the total by value, went to small businesses.

Four months into the following fiscal year, one transaction beat that entire annual total.▸ Project Vault establishes a U.S. Strategic Critical Minerals Reserve with manufacturers including Boeing, GE Vernova, General Motors and Western Digital as members; EXIM's loan is paired with nearly $2 billion in private-sector capital, per the Congressional Research Service, which also describes the $10 billion loan as a record for the agency.

Even after Project Vault, EXIM has room under its statutory ceiling: the bank's total portfolio exposure stood at $34.8 billion as of September 30, 2025 — 25.8% of its $135 billion lending cap, leaving roughly $100 billion technically available.▸ The constraint on EXIM isn't the size of its statutory authority. It's the calendar.

EXIM is required by its charter to report a quarterly default rate to Congress: overdue payments divided by the total financing outstanding in its active portfolio.▸ If that rate reaches 2%, the bank's lending authority freezes until the rate falls back below the line.

The rate isn't close to 2% — but it has been climbing, and not for the reason a default rate usually climbs.▸ EXIM's own annual report says plainly that the FY2025 increase was "driven primarily by a decline in total financing outstanding rather than a material increase in defaults." In other words: the book of business the rate is measured against has been shrinking faster than the overdue payments have.

The December 2025 default-rate report puts the active portfolio at $54.5 billion, down from $83.7 billion three years earlier — a 34.9% decline — while the default rate rose from 1.511% to 1.050% over the same window (it fell in the middle of that period before ticking back up).▸ At the same time, EXIM carried $2.2 billion in loss reserves against that portfolio, 6.4% of exposure, as of the end of FY2025. None of this is close to triggering the statutory freeze. It is, however, the mechanical backdrop against which the bank just wrote its largest single check.

EXIM's general statutory authority was last renewed in 2019, for seven years, and is set to expire December 31, 2026 — along with the China and Transformational Exports Program, the mandate that reserves at least 20% of EXIM's lending capacity, roughly $27 billion, to counter Chinese state export financing.▸ If Congress takes no action, the bank generally cannot approve new transactions after that date; it would manage its existing loans and guarantees through what the Congressional Research Service calls "an orderly liquidation."

Congress has multiple proposals in front of it, per the same CRS report: a Senate bill, S. 3772, would extend both the general charter and the CTEP sunset by ten years, to 2036 — the longest renewal in the bank's history.▸ A narrower five-year draft, paired with a four-year extension of the $135 billion lending cap, circulated at a House Financial Services Committee hearing in March 2026. Neither has become law as of publication.

EXIM's export-value and jobs-supported figures are the agency's own input-output model estimates, not measured headcounts or independently audited totals; portfolio, exposure, and default-rate figures are drawn from EXIM's own statutorily mandated reports, most recently as of December 31, 2025.