Following months of negotiations, Congresswoman Maxine Waters (D-CA), Chairwoman of the House Financial Services Committee, applauded the inclusion of World Bank funding and seven-year reauthorizations of the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act (TRIA) and the Export-Import Bank (EXIM) in House FY2020 appropriations legislation.
The provisions included in the appropriations legislation closely mirror the text of H.R. 4634, the Terrorism Risk Insurance Program Reauthorization Act of 2019, and draw extensively from H.R. 4863, the United States Export Finance Agency Act of 2019, legislation introduced by Chairwoman Waters during the 116th Congress.
In January, Chairwoman Waters set goals for the Committee to increase efforts to work on a bipartisan basis including the long-term reauthorization and reform of the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP), Terrorism Risk Insurance (TRIA), and the reauthorization of the job-creating Export-Import Bank.
The passage of the appropriations legislation will fulfill two of those goals through the long-term reauthorization of TRIA and the EXIM bank.
Chairwoman Waters has also worked to ensure that the National Flood Insurance Program, which will expire on September 30, 2020, does not lapse.
In June, the Committee passed H.R. 3167, The National Flood Insurance Program Reauthorization Act of 2019, bipartisan legislation introduced by Chairwoman Waters to reauthorize the NFIP for five years and also includes a number of reforms to increase affordability, improve mapping, enhance mitigation, and modernize the NFIP. Chairwoman Waters and Members of the Committee continue their efforts to provide certainty to the market by working to come to an agreement on a long-term reauthorization that reforms the NFIP to better protect homeowners.
Finally, the appropriations legislation includes a capital increase for the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, World Bank funding that Chairwoman Waters and other Democrats had fought for. In connection with this funding, the President of the World Bank is making a commitment to no longer collect or include labor data in its Doing Business report, because the data had previously been used to undermine worker protections. Chairwoman Waters pressed the Bank to make this commitment.
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