Congress faces looming deadline to raise government’s debt limit
WASHINGTON While Congress has been focused on creating a new health care law and confirming President Trump’s Cabinet nominees, lawmakers have paid scant attention to a looming Thursday deadline to raise the government’s debt limit so that it can pay its bills and avoid a potential economic crisis.
The U.S. Treasury Department’s power to borrow money will expire March 16 unless Congress acts to raise the debt ceiling. Although the Treasury won’t run out of cash to pay creditors until sometime this fall, any delay in raising the debt limit could risk the government’s credit rating and cost taxpayers billions of dollars in increased borrowing costs.
Here’s a look at what’s at stake: The debt limit, also called the debt ceiling, is the legal amount that the U.S. Treasury can borrow to pay the government’s bills, including Social Security and Medicare benefits, military salaries, tax refunds, interest on the national debt, and other obligations. The limit is set by Congress. do so again. Still, it’s unclear if lawmakers will act by Thursday.
The issue could be complicated because some conservative Republicans are hoping to tie any increase in the debt limit to legislation to reduce the nation’s $441 billion deficit. Yet House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, DCalif., said Democrats will only support a “clean” debt limit increase that has no other legislation attached.
“We stand ready to work with the president to lift the debt ceiling — a clean debt ceiling, not one that is bogged down in ideological who-knows-what,” she said. has never happened before.
Congress has missed the deadline to raise the debt limit in the past, but it has always taken action before the Treasury ran out of money to pay its creditors. In 2011, lawmakers failed to raise the debt ceiling by that year’s May deadline, resulting in Standard & Poor’s downgrading the government’s credit rating for the first time. Congress finally lifted the debt limit in August, just two days before the Treasury estimated it would have run out of funds.