The Make More in America Act Is a Negotiating Marker for the Year-End EXIM Reauthorization
Senate Democrats introduced the Make More in America Act on June 15, 2026 to turn the Export-Import Bank's domestic-financing initiative into a permanent industrial-policy program. It is an introduced minority-party bill that lands into the year-end reauthorization fight as the charter sunsets December 31, 2026.
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The Make More in America Act is a Democratic marker for the year-end Export-Import Bank reauthorization, and it would layer demand-side financing on top of the existing tariff wall
Senate Democrats introduced the Make More in America Act on June 15, 2026, and on its own terms it would convert the Export-Import Bank (EXIM) board-created domestic-financing initiative into a permanent statutory industrial-policy program. It is an introduced bill from the minority party rather than enacted law, and it functions as a marker in the year-end reauthorization fight, because the EXIM charter . The provisions most likely to become law are the ones that get folded into that reauthorization. Functionally the bill would add a demand-side federal financing layer on top of the supply-side tariff and trade-remedy wall that already protects batteries, critical minerals, solar, and shipbuilding through Section 301, Section 232, antidumping and countervailing duty orders, and forced-labor enforcement. The bankability of those projects would become more comprehensive and more politically contingent at the same time, because the financing depends on a charter that lapses absent reauthorization and the tariffs depend on actions that can be modified or traded away.
What the bill proposes, and what is already in place
The bill was introduced by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer with Senators Jack Reed, Amy Klobuchar, Chris Coons, Brian Schatz, Cory Booker, Elizabeth Warren, Chris Van Hollen, Tammy Duckworth, Mark Kelly, Andy Kim, Lisa Blunt Rochester, and Angela Alsobrooks. As reported, it would create a permanent Make More in America Program focused on expanding manufacturing capacity and would authorize the bank to support the development, commercialization, production, and future export of technologies deemed critical to U.S. competitiveness and national security. That language matters because it moves the bank beyond traditional export-credit support toward financing domestic industrial capacity with a future-export or supply-chain-security nexus.
Several specific provisions trace to subscription trade-press reporting rather than to a posted bill text, and they should be confirmed against the introduced bill and Congress.gov before reliance. The reported priority industries include semiconductors, artificial intelligence, quantum, biotechnology, advanced energy systems, critical minerals, drones, robotics, batteries, and shipbuilding. The reported financial tools include loans, guarantees, grants, cooperative agreements, offtake agreements, price insurance and other insurance facilities, advanced payments, and other-transaction authority. Reporting also describes a ten-year investment roadmap committee chaired by the bank president, guardrails barring the use of assistance for stock buybacks or repayment of existing debt, clawbacks for missed deadlines or labor requirements, prevailing-wage and workforce-training conditions, and a bar on support flowing to senior executive-branch officials, members of Congress, and their immediate family members. The reported default-rate cap change would raise the cap from 2 percent to 4 percent for most lending and to 10 percent for the Make More in America Program and the China and Transformational Exports Program.
The existing Make More in America authority is narrow and jobs-based
The function the bill would codify already exists as a board initiative rather than a statute. The Export-Import Bank board unanimously approved the Make More in America Initiative on April 14, 2022, making the bank's existing medium and long-term loans, guarantees, and insurance available to export-oriented domestic manufacturing and infrastructure projects. The program parameters are restrictive. A project must tie 15 percent of output to exports for small-business, transformational, or climate projects and 25 percent for other sectors. A jobs-based sizing test substitutes for the content rule applied to foreign-buyer deals, with each job-year unlocking financing on a published per-job basis. The bank must find that private financing is unavailable on acceptable terms, must underwrite to a reasonable assurance of repayment, and caps support at 80 percent of project financing, with board approval for every domestic transaction and congressional notification above $50 million.
The program is demand-driven and uncapped in form but modest in practice. Per the Congressional Research Service, the bank approved $8.7 billion in transactions in fiscal year 2025 supporting an estimated $10.1 billion in exports, and individual Make More in America deals are small, on the order of tens of millions of dollars. The initiative is a niche tool today rather than a major share of the bank's exposure, which is dominated by guarantees and conventional loans.
CTEP and the Trump-era critical-minerals pivot are the bipartisan core
The China and Transformational Exports Program, created in the 2019 reauthorization, directs the bank to reserve not less than 20 percent of its $135 billion authority, roughly $27 billion, to counter Chinese export-credit competition across ten transformational areas including artificial intelligence, semiconductors, quantum, biotech, and energy storage. The program offers a 51 percent U.S.-content threshold against the 85 percent standard and sunsets on December 31, 2026 alongside the charter.
The bipartisan element is that the Trump administration is already using the bank for domestic industrial policy administratively. The board approved Project Vault on February 2, 2026, a direct loan of up to $10 billion backed by nearly $2 billion in private investment to stand up a strategic critical-minerals reserve, which the bank describes as more than double its largest prior financing. The administration has also expanded the bank's invocation of the Defense Production Act for critical minerals and built a Supply Chain Resiliency Initiative that finances foreign mining tied to U.S. offtake. The bill's Democratic sponsors are codifying and expanding a use of the bank that the administration is pursuing through existing authority, which is why a 10-year clean reauthorization and a China-program expansion are moving on parallel tracks. Democrats have separately raised conflict-of-interest and transparency objections to Project Vault, so the convergence is on the tool rather than on every deal.
The reported new tools are the consequential part
Loans, guarantees, and insurance are existing bank instruments, so codification alone would not change much. The reported additions that would matter are grants, explicit offtake authority, price insurance or price-floor facilities, advanced payments, and other-transaction authority, because they address the project-bankability risks that conventional loans do not solve. Offtake agreements give a producer a guaranteed buyer at a set volume and price, which de-risks a final investment decision for thinly traded minerals, mirroring the offtake structures used by the Office of Strategic Capital, Defense Production Act Title III, and the administration's bilateral mineral deals. Price insurance protects a producer against a China-driven price collapse, and if structured as a floor it would operate as a demand-side complement to tariffs. EXIM already runs offtake-like structures through the Supply Chain Resiliency Initiative and Project Vault under existing authority, so the open question is whether the bill grants explicit statutory authority for these instruments, which is exactly what should be checked against the bill text.
The reported eligibility trigger keyed to evidence of subsidies or production support by foreign countries would import a trade-remedy predicate into a financing test. That parallels the countervailing-duty concept of actionable foreign subsidies and the non-market overcapacity framing used for Chinese batteries, solar, and shipbuilding, and it would tie bank underwriting to the same findings that drive trade defense. This crossover is reported but not yet confirmed against statutory wording.
Demand-side financing meets the supply-side tariff wall
The sectors the bill targets are already walled off by trade-defense measures, which is why the financing layer functions as the demand-side half of a regime whose supply-side half already exists. The Section 301 China tariffs, including the maritime action, create the clearest example. USTR's final Section 301 maritime determination imposes escalating port fees on Chinese-owned, operated, and built vessels, beginning at $50 per net ton on October 14, 2025 and rising toward $140 by 2028. That fee schedule raises the relative cost of Chinese-linked vessels, while the bill would finance the domestic supply capacity needed for any shift toward U.S.-built ships. Because the maritime package contains multiple fee categories and phased stages, any suspension or modification should be read category by category rather than as a change to the whole package.
Section 232 adds steel, aluminum, and derivative-product tariffs, and the January 2026 proclamation on processed critical minerals reflects the same concern with import dependence and price suppression, while pending Section 232 actions on semiconductors and robotics overlap the bill's priority list. Antidumping and countervailing duty orders cover batteries and solar inputs, and forced-labor enforcement under the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act covers solar, battery, and critical-mineral supply chains. The policy logic is that tariffs raise the price of imports while bank financing and offtake guarantee revenue and lower the cost of capital. Layering both creates a more complete industrial-policy regime and a more reversible one, because tariff and fee measures can be modified, suspended, or traded away while the bank's authority itself lapses absent reauthorization. The bank sits alongside the IRA advanced-manufacturing production credit, the CHIPS Act, the Department of Energy Loan Programs Office, and Defense Production Act Title III, and its distinct niche is that its tools are fee-funded and self-financing rather than appropriations-dependent.
The reported default-rate cap increase is the clearest risk-tolerance lever
The reported increase in the default-rate cap is one of the most operationally significant changes in the bill. The charter currently freezes new lending if the bankwide default rate reaches 2 percent, and the Congressional Research Service reports that the agency held reserves well above its losses with a default rate near 1 percent at the most recent reporting, so the cap is a policy constraint rather than a sign of distress. Raising the cap to 4 percent generally, and to 10 percent for the Make More in America Program and the China program, would let the bank take on riskier and earlier-stage projects such as greenfield mines and first-of-a-kind battery or nuclear plants without tripping the automatic stop-work trigger. The specific figures should be confirmed against the bill text.
What a U.S. company should watch
Companies in semiconductors, critical minerals, batteries, shipbuilding, biotech, robotics, and advanced energy are the intended beneficiaries. Codification plus a higher default cap would give the bank more room to consider earlier-stage or higher-risk projects that are difficult to fit within today's reasonable-assurance-of-repayment standard and 2 percent default-cap constraint. The bankability shift comes from offtake and price insurance, which address the two risks lenders fear most in critical-mineral and battery projects, the absence of a guaranteed buyer and price volatility, and combined with tariff protection on the import side they change project returns enough to crowd in private co-investment. A developer should scope Make More in America and Supply Chain Resiliency Initiative eligibility now under existing authority, where offtake-backed structures already work, and position to move if the new tools are enacted. The content question is whether the codified program keeps the jobs-based metric or imports CHIPS and IRA-style domestic-content and foreign-entity-of-concern restrictions.
The structure depends on two reversible conditions, reauthorization before the December 31, 2026 lapse and the tariffs staying in place. A financing regime layered on tariffs is powerful but fragile, because a trade deal that lifts duties or a charter lapse could strand projects underwritten on those assumptions. A company should model the demand-side financing and the supply-side tariff effects together and stress-test the removal of either.
Bottom line
The Make More in America Act is an introduced minority-party bill rather than enacted law, and it lands into the year-end Export-Import Bank reauthorization fight as the charter and the China program both sunset on December 31, 2026. The likeliest path to enactment is as amendments folded into that reauthorization rather than as a standalone statute, and the markers that would change this assessment are a markup text, a Congress.gov bill number, or a budget score. The substance that would matter most is the reported set of demand-side tools, offtake authority, price insurance, grants, and other-transaction authority, together with a default-rate cap raised from 2 percent to 4 percent and to 10 percent for the priority programs. Those provisions would expand the bank from an export-credit agency toward a domestic industrial-financing institution that operates as the demand-side complement to the Section 301, Section 232, and trade-remedy wall already in place. A company in the target sectors should treat the bill as a planning signal, scope existing Make More in America and Supply Chain Resiliency Initiative eligibility now, and model financing and tariffs together because both are reversible.
Caveats
This is an introduced bill, and nothing about its provisions is law. The existing Make More in America function is a 2022 board initiative rather than a statute. Several specific provisions described here, including the 4 percent and 10 percent default-cap figures, the financial-tools list, the roadmap-committee composition, the inclusion of ship repair and advanced nuclear technology, and the foreign-subsidy eligibility trigger, trace to subscription trade-press reporting that could not be independently confirmed against a posted bill text or a sponsor press release during this research, and they are flagged as reported rather than verified. No Senate bill number was confirmable in open sources at the time of writing, and the reporting cited above is wire coverage that appears to be derived from the draft bill rather than a primary text. The charter sunset, the existing program parameters, the China program mandate, Project Vault, and the tariff measures are drawn from official Export-Import Bank, Federal Register, USTR, and Congressional Research Service sources and are more firmly established. Prior legislative versions titled Make More in America Act could not be verified, and the 2022 reference is to the board initiative rather than to a bill.