WASHINGTON — President-elect Donald Trump is doubling down on his call for Congress to take care of an upcoming deadline to address the nation’s debt limit before he returns to the White House next month, this time blasting former Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy for a deal worked out to suspend the ceiling last year.
“The extension of the Debt Ceiling by a previous Speaker of the House, a good man and a friend of mine, from this past September of the Biden Administration, to June of the Trump Administration, will go down as one of the dumbest political decisions made in years,” Trump wrote in a post on his social media site on Sunday night.
McCarthy and President Joe Biden hammered out an agreement to suspend the debt ceiling until January 2025 the last time the nation was careening toward a potential default in June 2023. The limit represents the total dollar figure the U.S. government is allowed to borrow to pay for things, such as Social Security benefits and military salaries, that Congress and the White House have already signed off on.
The suspension came as part of a package – which took weeks of intense negotiations – that also sought to limit government spending. At the time, the winner of November’s presidential election, and thus the administration that would be required to take on the next debt ceiling increase, was not known.
In a letter to Congressional leaders last week in which she urged lawmakers to “protect the full faith and credit” of the U.S., outgoing Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said she expects the country to hit the new debt limit between Jan. 14 and Jan. 23. At that point, the U.S. will deploy what it calls "extraordinary measures" to avoid a default, something that typically lasts a few months and pushes the real deadline into the second Trump administration, likely a date in late spring or early summer.
Trump is making clear he wants the issue addressed before his return to office on Jan. 20, a move that would clear the way for Congress, which will be controlled by Republicans, to hone in on his agenda without the debt limit hanging over its head.
“The Democrats must be forced to take a vote on this treacherous issue NOW, during the Biden Administration, and not in June,” Trump wrote in his Sunday Truth Social post. “They should be blamed for this potential disaster, not the Republicans!”
Lawmakers have just two weeks in the Capitol building between the start of the new Congress and Trump’s inauguration.
The president-elect threw Congressional leaders a bit of a curveball when he demanded the debt limit be addressed as part of a short-term government funding deal days before a deadline to avert a shutdown earlier this month. The topic had not previously been brought up publicly in discussions over the funding deadline.
But dozens of House Republicans bucked Speaker Mike Johnson’s attempt to pass a spending bill that also included Trump’s debt request, leading the Louisiana congressman to shepard a bill through the chamber that ignored the demand.
The nation’s debt increased by $7.8 trillion over Trump’s first four years in office, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, or CRFB. Debt held by the public, which CRFB considers a more meaningful measure, grew by $7.2 trillion during Trump’s first term. By comparison, debt held by the public increased by about $7.7 trillion over the eight years Trump’s predecessor, former President Barack Obama, was in the White House, according to CRFB.