AIA: President, Congress Must Come Together to Finalize Critical Investments in America’s Future

The continuing resolution signed into law today was a welcome and necessary short-term solution to provide essential government funding. Now Congress and the President need to work together to finish the Fiscal Year 2020 budget and reauthorize the U.S. Export-Import Bank by the November 21st deadline.

“While it was critical to take action to avoid a shutdown, we cannot keep depending on continuing resolutions,” said AIA President and CEO Eric Fanning. “Financial uncertainty hampers industry’s ability to support the government’s vital missions of developing cutting-edge aviation technology, sustaining American leadership in space, and strengthening American national security and economic success. We need a finalized budget.”

Essential aerospace and defense programs rely on stable and timely government funding, from the FAA research that will pave the way for new technologies like Urban Air Mobility, to NASA’s lunar program that will get us back to the Moon and beyond, to NOAA’s work using satellites to watch over communities during hurricane season, to the Department of Defense’s investments in innovation. Stable and timely federal funding also helps protect the work and livelihood of the American A&D workforce, our industry’s strongest asset.

In addition, if the Export-Import Bank is not reauthorized, we will lose one of America’s best tools to ensure competitiveness in the global market. This would put American manufacturing jobs in jeopardy and undermine the economic success of critical industries.

Our industry calls on Congress and the Administration to pass and sign a finished FY20 budget and reauthorize the Export-Import Bank before the clock runs out on November 21.