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 The White House signed off on the reforms in 2010, but U.S.
lawmakers need to back changes in how the IMF is funded before they
can be put into place, given Washington's position as a controlling
shareholder in the global lender.
But a must-pass $1.1 trillion U.S. spending bill unveiled late on
Tuesday omits the IMF voting reform provision, dooming prospects
that it will get passed by a year-end deadline.
Finance chiefs from around the world had given the United States
until Jan. 1 to ratify the reforms, and have threatened to move
forward without it if it fails to do so.
The changes would double the fund's resources and hand more IMF
voting power to countries such as Brazil, Russia, India, China and
South Africa, also known as BRICS. It would also revamp the IMF's
board to reduce dominance of Western Europe.
 "Without these reforms, emerging economies may well look outside the
IMF and the international economic system that we helped design,"
U.S. Treasury Undersecretary Nathan Sheets said last week.
Some outside observers believe the lack of reforms was the impetus
behind the decision of the BRICS nations to launch their own
currency reserve pool and development bank earlier this year,
intended as a challenge to Western dominance in global financial
institutions.
China also launched a proposed $50 billion Asian Infrastructure
Investment Bank, seen as a direct rival to the Western-dominated
World Bank and Asian Development Bank.
Twice this year, BRICS nations threatened to veto a renewal of the
IMF's crisis funds as a sign of their displeasure over the lack of
reforms, according to several sources close to the IMF board.
The crisis fund, known as the New Arrangements to Borrow, was meant
as a temporary credit line. But the IMF has been forced to rely more
heavily on the NAB and bilateral lending to fund bail-outs of
countries like Ukraine and Jamaica while it waits for U.S.
ratification of the reforms, which would double its main accounts.
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Some Republicans have complained the IMF changes would cost too much
at a time of big budget deficits in Washington. They are also
critical of how efficiently the IMF was helping struggling economies
in Europe and the risks attached to billion-dollar IMF loans to
countries like Greece.
The Obama administration last made a big public push to include the
IMF reforms in a broader funding package for Ukraine in March, but
U.S. Senate Democrats dropped the language to ensure smooth passage
of the bill.
This time around, the administration appears to have run a quieter
campaign, meeting numerous times with lawmakers on Capitol Hill over
the past few months, according to a source familiar with the
discussions who was not authorized to speak publicly. Sheets and
U.S. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew also brought up the IMF issue
during meetings with lawmakers, the source said.
But three congressional aides, who requested anonymity, said the
administration had not mounted a forceful push.
"They haven't really put their shoulder into it, at all, in the last
nine months," said one source familiar with IMF legislative issues.
(Reporting by Anna Yukhananov; Editing by Jonathan Oatis, Tim Ahmann
and Diane Craft)
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