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The fight over the reauthorization of the corporatist Export-Import Bank is one waged by friends of cronyism against friends of consumers.
On the cronies’ side are the special-interest groups who want Ex-Im’s charter extended because they benefit from this bureaucracy’s handouts. On the consumers’ side are scholars and journalists who’ve tried to shed light on what the Depression-era federal export-credit corporation actually does. (Shocker: it grants privileges mostly to well-connected, politically powerful companies.)
The fight on the consumers’ side just became much more difficult. The public datasets that were used to produce charts [2] and articles [3] analyzing Ex-Im’s activities have been removed from Data.Gov (“The home of the U.S. Government’s open data” as you can read on the website). You can read more about this episode here [4].
Thankfully, the data have just been restored, for everyone to use, by some of my colleagues at George Mason University’s Mercatus Center: Veronique de Rugy, Andrea Castillo, Chris Koopman, and Eli Dourado.
The website is called “Ex-Im Uncensored [5]” and it includes the main dataset that was removed from Data.gov, plus the state-by-state data that were gotten from Ex-Im.gov and now made available in a more user-friendly form.