News: House Financial Services Committee Chair French Hill (R-Ark.) walked away from another set of financial policy talks tied to the annual defense authorization package, according to multiple people familiar with the decision.
The four corners of financial policy leadership in Congress were negotiating a series of NDAA amendments last week that would have bolstered the Community Development Financial Institutions Fund.
CDFIs have strong bipartisan support on Capitol Hill, but the program has been under scrutiny from the Trump administration for much of the year. CDFIs are specialized lenders certified by the Treasury Department to do community development lending and other activities.
Staff representing three of those corners — Sens. Tim Scott (R-S.C.), Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) — were supportive of language to bolster the CDFI Fund, the people familiar said. But aides for the Arkansas Republican abruptly announced their opposition to the amendments via internal talks on Wednesday. The collapse hasn’t previously been reported.
The amendments under discussion would have introduced a new requirement for the Treasury secretary to testify before Congress about the CDFI Fund, expand the CDFI Bond Guarantee Program and enhance CDFIs’ access to capital and liquidity, according to two people with knowledge of the talks.
Hill’s aides declined to comment.
Lawmakers could return to the table before the conference version of the NDAA is finalized. But time is running out for committee leaders to hammer out these types of disagreements as defense lawmakers are pushing to introduce a finalized NDAA early next week.
Resistance redux. This isn’t the first set of bicameral talks that has run into opposition from the House Financial Services Committee this year.
As we wrote last week, House Republicans threw up opposition to bipartisan housing talks that would have incorporated much of the ROAD to Housing Act into the annual defense package, subject to approval from congressional leadership.
These CDFI policy talks were on a separate track from housing negotiations.
