US debt limit back into effect

washington — The national debt limit came back into force at a level near $20 trillion, prompting the Trump administration to alert Congress about the measures it will take to stay under the new limit.

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said in a letter to lawmakers that that he has started employing bookkeeping measures to avoid breaching the new limit, a process that will provide possibly five months or more for Congress to raise the limit.

The borrowing limit had been suspended since November 2015, allowing the government to borrow as much as needed to meet obligations. However, the 2015 legislation set March 16 as the date that the debt limit would go back into effect at whatever debt level existed on March 15.

The Treasury Department reported that the debt stood at $19.8 trillion at the close of business on Wednesday. That figure will become the new borrowing limit, and Mnuchin will be required to take a variety of actions to keep below that limit.

Those maneuvers, set out in law, are deemed “extraordinary measures” but in reality they have been employed numerous times by Mnuchin’s predecessors to buy time until Congress could pass the legislation needed to raise the borrowing limit.

In his letter to Congress on Thursday, Mnuchin said he had suspended sales of state and local government series securities, which are special bonds that Treasury sells to state and local governments to provide them with a place to make investments that will eventually be used for such projects as infrastructure spending. —