The Development Finance Corporation (DFC), a little-known government agency, opened its first Wall Street outpost last week — and it’s got $205 billion and a mission to out-invest China on the world stage.
“American investment is one of the – if not the most – powerful tools of economic statecraft,” DFC chief executive officer Ben Black told me about the agency’s strategy.
While DOGE and Congress took a machete to agency budgets across Washington, the DFC did the opposite — tripling its war chest from $60 billion to $205 billion to combat China’s global influence campaign known as the Belt and Road Initiative.
The agency was launched in 2019, during Trump’s first term, and has already made key investments in rare earth minerals — including cobalt in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and rare earths in Angola. It even structured Trump’s Ukraine Critical Minerals Fund.
Now the ambitions are bigger — and the geography is expanding. For the first time, DFC is setting its sights on first-world nations, using investments in places like Europe to expand America’s presence abroad.
While DFC can’t match China dollar for dollar, they are embracing a uniquely American model of public-private partnership.
China’s Belt and Road Initiative — a trillion-dollar global infrastructure campaign launched in 2013 to expand Beijing’s economic and political influence across more than 165 countries — has long outpaced American investment abroad.
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“China last year alone deployed an estimated $250 billion in this initiative,” a DFC spokesperson said. “So we’re never going to be able to match China dollar for dollar – nor should we, because we have a different government and different system. Instead, every dollar we invest should lead to two, three, four, five times private sector dollars coming in alongside of us.”
DFC is doubling down on that capitalist approach with its new Wall Street office. Agency sources explained being in the city will give them access to recruiting top talent and the ability to raise capital in America’s financial center.
“To accomplish President Trump’s unprecedented foreign policy agenda, DFC must operate at the pace of the private sector,” Black said. “Opening our office in New York City, the global capital of finance, enables us to execute on investment opportunities worldwide, attract top tier private sector talent, and provide current DFC staff with the access and relationships that will help this agency bridge the gap between Washington and Wall Street.”
Black, a longtime private-sector investor, has been leading the charge since he was sworn in last October. His last name may sound familiar — he’s the son of Apollo Global Management co-founder Leon Black, and spent nearly two decades in finance before taking the DFC helm, starting as a Goldman Sachs analyst, working at Apollo, and later founding his own firm, Fortinbras Enterprises.
He hired his co-founder at Fortinbras, Conor Coleman, to serve as Chief of Staff and Head of Investments at DFC. And they’re just getting started.
“The private sector is looking for a partner. They want to know that as they come into these international markets alongside of us, the U.S. government is actually there in a meaningful way,” Coleman told The Post. “We’re getting people who want to come in and serve their country with a very unique set of skills that maybe historically they did not think they would be able to serve their country with.”
