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Yellen’s Debt Limit Warnings Went Unheeded, Leaving Her to Face Fallout

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The Treasury secretary, who considered ways to contain the fallout of a default when she was a Fed official in 2011, had urged Democrats to raise the limit while they still had control of Congress.In the days after November’s midterm elections, Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen was feeling upbeat about the fact that Democrats had performed better than expected and maintained control of the Senate.But as she traveled to the Group of 20 leaders summit in Indonesia that month, she said Republicans taking control of the House posed a new threat to the U.S. economy.“I always worry about the debt ceiling,” Ms. Yellen told The New York Times in an interview on her flight from New Delhi to Bali, Indonesia, in which she urged Democrats to use their remaining time in control of Washington to lift the debt limit beyond the 2024 elections. “Any way that Congress can find to get it done, I’m all for.”Democrats did not heed Ms. Yellen’s advice. Instead, the United States has spent most of this year inching toward the brink of default as Republicans refused to raise or suspend the nation’s $31.4 trillion borrowing limit without capping spending and rolling back parts of President Biden’s agenda.Now the federal government’s cash balance has fallen below $40 billion. And on Friday, Ms. Yellen told lawmakers that the X-date — the point at which the Treasury Department runs out of enough money to pay all its bills on time — will arrive by June 5.Ms. Yellen has held her contingency plans close to the vest but signaled this week that she had been thinking about how to prepare for the worst. Speaking at a WSJ CEO Council event, the Treasury secretary laid out the difficult decisions she would face if the Treasury was forced to choose which bills to prioritize.Most market watchers expect that the Treasury Department would opt to make interest and principal payments to bondholders before paying other bills, yet Ms. Yellen would say only that she would face “very tough choices.”White House officials have refused to say if any contingency planning is underway. Early this year, Biden administration officials said they were not planning for how to prioritize payments. As the U.S. edges closer to default, the Treasury Department declined to say whether that has changed.Yet former Treasury and Federal Reserve officials said it was nearly certain that emergency plans were being devised.Christopher Campbell, who served as assistant Treasury secretary for financial institutions from 2017 to 2018, said that given the rapidly approaching X-date, “one would expect” that “there would be quiet conversations between the Treasury Department and the White House around how they would manage a technical default and perhaps prioritization of payments.”The Treasury Department has developed a default playbook from previous debt limit standoffs in 2011 and 2013. And Ms. Yellen has become quite familiar with those: During the last two significant standoffs — in 2011 and 2013 — she was a top Federal Reserve official contemplating how the central bank would try to contain fallout from a default.Ms. Yellen was briefed on the Treasury’s plans during those debates and engaged in her own contingency discussions about how to stabilize the financial system in the event that the United States could not pay all of its bills on time.According to the Fed’s transcripts, the Treasury Department did in fact plan to prioritize principal and interest payments to bondholders in the event that the X-date was breached. Although Treasury Department officials had trepidations about the idea, they had expressed to Fed officials that it could ultimately be done.Fed officials also discussed steps that they could take to stabilize money markets and to prevent failed Treasury auctions from prompting a default even if the Treasury Department was successfully paying creditors. Ms. Yellen said in both 2011 and 2013 that she was on board with plans to protect the financial system.“I expect that actions of this type might well prove unnecessary after the Treasury finally states that they do intend to pay principal and interest on time and we have finally issued our own set of policy statements,” Ms. Yellen said in 2011. “But if the stress nevertheless escalates, I’d support interventions to alleviate pressures on money market funds.”Ms. Yellen added that she was concerned about how vulnerable market infrastructure was in the event of a default and said officials should be thinking about ways to plan for a default in the future.Despite Ms. Yellen’s efforts to steer clear of the politics surrounding the debt limit, Republicans have been expressing doubts about her credibility. Haiyun Jiang/The New York Times“Given that we could face a similar situation somewhere down the road, I think it’s important for us to think about lessons learned so that we and markets will be better prepared if we face such a situation again,” Ms. Yellen said.Eric Rosengren, who was the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston in 2011, said in an interview that he expected that Ms. Yellen, who is known for being rigorously prepared, was busy considering contingency plans as she did at the Fed more than a decade ago.“It would be irrational not to do some planning,” said Mr. Rosengren, adding that Ms. Yellen’s background of dealing with financial stability matters makes her well placed to be as ready as possible for the fallout of a default. “The last thing you want is to be completely unprepared and have the worst outcome.”As the debt ceiling standoff has intensified, Ms. Yellen has not been as involved in negotiations with lawmakers as her some of her predecessors.Mr. Biden tapped Shalanda Young, his budget director, and Steven J. Ricchetti, White House counselor, to lead the negotiations with House Republicans. Ms. Yellen has not attended the Oval Office meetings between Mr. Biden and Republicans.“It doesn’t look from the outside like Yellen is playing an active role in the budget negotiations,” said David Wessel, a senior economic fellow at the Brookings Institution who worked with Ms. Yellen at Brookings. “That may be that it’s not her comparative advantage, it may be that the White House wants to do it themselves, and it may be that they want to protect the credibility of Treasury predicting the X-date.”Ms. Yellen has taken a more behind the scenes role, briefing the White House on the nation’s cash reserves, calling business leaders and asking them to urge Republicans to lift the debt limit and sending increasingly regular letters to Congress warning when the federal government will be unable to pay all its bills.A White House official pointed out that Ms. Yellen has been the Biden administration’s primary messenger on the debt limit on the Sunday morning talk shows, and that she is coordinating on a daily basis with Jeffrey D. Zients, the White House chief of staff, and Lael Brainard, the director of the National Economic Council, to plot the administration’s strategy. Other officials have participated in the Oval Office meetings because the White House continues to view them as budget negotiations, the official added.The Treasury secretary also cut short a recent trip to Japan for a meeting of the Group of 7 finance ministers so she could return to Washington to deal with the debt limit.Despite Ms. Yellen’s efforts to steer clear of the politics surrounding the debt limit, Republicans have been expressing doubts about her credibility.Members of the House Freedom Caucus wrote a letter to Speaker Kevin McCarthy recently urging Republican leaders to demand that Ms. Yellen “furnish a complete justification” of her earlier projection that the U.S. could run out of cash as soon as June 1. In the letter, they accused her of “manipulative timing” and suggested that her forecasts should not be trusted because she was wrong about how hot inflation would get.The letter that Ms. Yellen sent on Friday provided a specific deadline — June 5 — and listed the upcoming payments that the federal government is required to make and explained why the Treasury Department would be unable to cover its debts beyond that date.Representative Patrick T. McHenry, a North Carolina Republican helping to lead the negotiations, said on Friday that there have been doubts about the X-date because it has been offered as a range. That, he said, is not what Americans experience when they do not have money to pay their mortgage bills on the day that they are due.“There was some skepticism of a date range — that you can pick whatever you want,” he said. “That is not how this works.”Republicans have also been targeting some of Ms. Yellen’s most prized policy priorities in the negotiations, such as rolling back some of the $80 billion that the Internal Revenue Service received as part of last year’s Inflation Reduction Act.The White House appears prepared to return $10 billion of those funds, which are intended to bolster the agency’s ability to catch tax cheats, in exchange for preserving other programs.In an interview on NBC’s Meet the Press this week, Ms. Yellen lamented that Republicans were targeting the money.“Something that greatly concerns me is that they have even been in favor of removing funding that’s been provided to the Internal Revenue Service to crack down on tax fraud,” she said.Whenever the debt limit standoff does subside, Democrats will most likely come under renewed pressure to overhaul the laws that govern the nation’s borrowing the next time they control the White House and Congress. Fearing that a fight over the debt limit would put her in the precarious position that she now faces, Ms. Yellen said in 2021 that she supported abolishing the borrowing cap.“I believe when Congress legislates expenditures and puts in place tax policy that determines taxes, those are the crucial decisions Congress is making,” Ms. Yellen said at a House Financial Services Committee hearing. “And if to finance those spending and tax decisions it is necessary to issue additional debt, I believe it is very destructive to put the president and myself, as Treasury secretary, in a situation where we might be unable to pay the bills that result from those past decisions.” More

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    White House and GOP Close In on Deal to Raise Debt Ceiling

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    The details had yet to be finalized, but negotiators were discussing a compromise that would allow Republicans to point to spending reductions and Democrats to say they had protected against large cuts.Top White House officials and Republican lawmakers were closing in Thursday on a deal that would raise the debt limit for two years while capping federal spending on everything but the military and veterans for the same period. Officials were racing to cement an agreement in time to avert a federal default that is projected in just one week.The deal taking shape would allow Republicans to say that they were reducing some federal spending — even as spending on the military and veterans’ programs would continue to grow — and allow Democrats to say they had spared most domestic programs from significant cuts.Negotiators from both sides were talking into the evening and beginning to draft legislative text, though some details remained in flux.“We’ve been talking to the White House all day, we’ve been going back and forth, and it’s not easy,” Mr. McCarthy told reporters as he left the Capitol on Thursday evening, declining to divulge what was under discussion. “It takes a while to make it happen, and we are working hard to make it happen.”The compromise, if it can be agreed upon and enacted, would raise the government’s borrowing limit for two years, past the 2024 election, according to three people familiar with it who insisted on anonymity to discuss a plan that was still being hammered out.The United States hit the legal limit, currently $31.4 trillion, in January and has been relying on accounting measures to avoid defaulting since then. The Treasury Department has projected it will exhaust its ability to pay bills on time as early as June 1.In exchange for lifting the debt limit, the deal would meet Republicans’ demand to cut some federal spending, albeit with the help of accounting maneuvers that would give both sides political cover for an agreement likely to be unpopular with large swaths of their base voters.It would impose caps on discretionary spending for two years, though those caps would apply differently to spending on the military than to nondefense discretionary spending. Spending on the military would grow next year, as would spending on some veterans’ care that falls under nondefense discretionary spending. The rest of nondefense discretionary spending would fall slightly — or roughly stay flat — compared with this year’s levels.The deal would also roll back $10 billion of the $80 billion Congress approved last year for an I.R.S. crackdown on high earners and corporations that evade taxes — funding that nonpartisan scorekeepers said would reduce the budget deficit by helping the government collect more of the tax revenue it is owed — though that provision was still under discussion. Democrats have championed the initiative, but Republicans have denounced it, claiming falsely that the money would be used to fund an army of auditors to go after working people.“The president and his negotiating team are fighting hard for his agenda, including for I.R.S. funding so it can provide better customer service to taxpayers and crack down on wealthy tax cheats,” a White House spokesman, Michael Kikukawa, said in an email on Thursday in response to a question about the provision.As the deal stood on Thursday, the I.R.S. money would essentially shift to nondefense discretionary spending, allowing Democrats to avoid further cuts in programs like education and environmental protection, according to people familiar with the pending agreement.The plan had yet to be finalized, and the bargainers continued to haggle over crucial details that could make or break any deal.“Nothing is done until you actually have a complete deal,” said Representative Patrick T. McHenry of North Carolina, one of the lead G.O.P. negotiators, who also declined to discuss the specifics of the negotiations. “Nothing’s resolved.”The cuts contained in the package were all but certain to be too modest to win the votes of hard-line fiscal conservatives in the House. Liberal groups were already complaining on Thursday about the reported deal to reduce the I.R.S. funding increase.But people familiar with the developing deal said that negotiators had agreed to fund military and veterans’ programs at the levels envisioned by President Biden in his budget for next year. They would reduce nondefense discretionary spending below this year’s levels — but much of that cut would be covered by the shift in the I.R.S. funding and other budgetary maneuvers. White House officials have contended those shifts would functionally make nondefense discretionary spending the same next year as it was this year.All discretionary spending would then grow at 1 percent in 2025, after which the caps would lift.Mr. McCarthy on Thursday had nodded to the idea that a compromise to avert a default would likely draw detractors from both parties.“I don’t think everybody is going to be happy at the end of the day,” he said. “That’s not how this system works.”Another provision of the deal seeks to avert a government shutdown later in the year, and would attempt to take away Republicans’ ability to seek deeper cuts to government programs and agencies through the appropriations process later in the year.The exact details on how such a measure would work remained unclear on Thursday evening. But it was based on a penalty of sorts, which would adjust the spending caps in the event that Congress failed to pass all 12 stand-alone spending bills that fund the government by the end of the calendar year.Negotiators were still at loggerheads over work requirements for social safety net programs and permitting reform for domestic energy and gas projects.“We have legislative work to do, policy work to do,” Mr. McHenry said. “The details of all that stuff really are consequential to us being able to get this thing through.”As negotiators inched closer to a deal, hard-right Republicans on Thursday were becoming increasingly anxious that Mr. McCarthy would sign off on a compromise they view as insufficiently conservative. Several right-wing Republicans have already vowed to oppose any compromise that retreats from cuts that were part of their debt-limit bill.“Republicans should not cut a bad deal,” Representative Chip Roy of Texas, an influential conservative, wrote on Twitter on Thursday morning, shortly after telling a local radio station that he was “going to have to go have some blunt conversations with my colleagues and the leadership team” because he did not like “the direction they are headed.”Representative Ralph Norman of South Carolina, said he was reserving judgment on how he would vote on a compromise until he saw the bill, but added: “What I’ve seen now is not good.”Former President Donald J. Trump, who has said that Republicans should force a default if they do not get what they want in the negotiations, also was weighing in. Mr. McCarthy told reporters he had spoken with Mr. Trump briefly about the negotiations — “it came up just for a second,” the speaker said. “He was talking about, ‘Make sure you get a good agreement.’”After playing a tee shot on his golf course outside of Washington, Mr. Trump approached a reporter for The New York Times, iPhone in hand, and showed a call with Speaker Kevin McCarthy.“It’s going to be an interesting thing — it’s not going to be that easy,” said Mr. Trump, who described his call with the speaker as “a little, quick talk.”“They’ve spent three years wasting money on nonsense,” he added, saying, “Republicans don’t want to see that, so I understand where they’re at.”Luke Broadwater More

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    Military Spending Emerges as Big Dispute in Debt-Limit Talks

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    President Biden has offered to freeze discretionary spending, including for defense. Republicans want to spend more for the military, and cut more elsewhere.Funding for the military has emerged as a key sticking point in reaching an agreement to raise the nation’s borrowing limit and prevent a catastrophic default, with Republicans pushing to spare the Defense Department from spending caps and make deeper cuts to domestic programs like education.President Biden has balked at that demand, pointing to a long series of past budget agreements that either cut or increased military spending in tandem with discretionary programs outside of defense.How the sides resolve that issue will be critical for the final outcome of any debt deal. It remains possible that in order to reach a deal that prevents a default, Democrats will accept an agreement that allows military spending to grow even as nondefense spending falls or stays flat.Mr. Biden’s aides and congressional Republicans deputized by Speaker Kevin McCarthy are trying to negotiate an agreement to lift the borrowing limit before the government runs out of money to pay its bills on time, which could be as soon as June 1. Republicans have refused to raise the limit unless Mr. Biden agrees to cuts in federal spending outside of the military.The talks over spending cuts have narrowed in focus to mostly cover a relatively small corner of the budget — what is known as discretionary spending. That spending is split into two parts. One is money for the military, which the Congressional Budget Office estimates will total $792 billion for the current fiscal year. The other half funds a wide range of domestic programs, like Head Start preschool and college Pell Grants, and federal agencies like the Interior and Energy Departments. It will total $919 billion this year, the budget office estimates.A separate category known as mandatory spending has largely been deemed off limits in the talks. That spending, which is the primary driver of future spending growth, includes programs like Social Security and Medicare.Administration officials have proposed freezing both halves of discretionary spending for next year. That would amount to a budget cut, compared with projected spending, under the way the budget office accounts for spending levels. Spending for both parts of the discretionary budget would be allowed to grow at just 1 percent for the 2025 fiscal year. That could also amount to a budget cut since 1 percent would almost certainly be less than the rate of inflation. That proposal would save about $1 trillion over the span of a decade, compared with current budget office forecasts.Republicans rejected that plan at the bargaining table. They are pushing to cut nondefense spending in actual terms — meaning, spend fewer dollars on it next year than the government spent this year. They also want to allow military spending to continue to grow.“It just sends a bad message and Republicans feel like it would not be in our best interest to cut spending at this juncture, when you’re looking at China and Russia and a lot of instability around the world,” said Representative Robert B. Aderholt, Republican of Alabama, who sits on an Appropriations panel that oversees Pentagon spending. “That’s been the basic position that most Republicans have.”Mr. McCarthy sounded a similar note when speaking to reporters on Thursday. “Look, we’re always looking where we could find savings and others, but we live in a very dangerous world,” he said. He added, “I think the Pentagon has to actually have more resources.”Republicans included 10-year caps on discretionary spending in a bill they passed last month that also raised the debt ceiling through next year, and party leaders said they would exempt the military from those caps. Mr. Biden has vowed to veto the bill if it passes the Senate in its current form, which is unlikely.White House officials have hammered Republicans over concentrating their proposed discretionary savings on domestic programs, saying their bill would gut spending on border enforcement, some veterans’ care, Meals on Wheels for older Americans and a host of other popular programs.“Speaker McCarthy and I have a very different view of who should bear the burden of additional efforts to get our fiscal house in order,” Mr. Biden said on Thursday at the White House. “I don’t believe the whole burden should fall on the backs of the middle class and working-class Americans.”Congressional Democrats, including members of committees that oversee military spending, have attacked Republicans for focusing largely on nondefense programs.“If you’re going to freeze discretionary spending, there’s no reason on earth why defense shouldn’t be part of that conversation,” said Representative Adam Smith of Washington, the top Democrat on the Armed Services Committee. Republicans, he said, “are taking a hostage to advance their very narrow agenda. I’m not a fan of that. That’s not something I’m going to want to support.”Any agreement that increased military spending while freezing or cutting other discretionary spending would break from a budget-deal tradition that dates to 2011, when House Republicans refused to raise the debt limit until President Barack Obama agreed to spending cuts. The deal that avoided default was centered on spending caps that split their reductions evenly between defense and nondefense programs.The push to increase military funding while cutting more heavily elsewhere reflects a divide in the House Republican caucus. It includes a large faction of defense hawks who say the military budget is too small, alongside another large faction of spending hawks who want to significantly shrink the fiscal footprint of the federal government.Mr. McCarthy needs both factions to retain his hold on the speakership, which he narrowly won this year after a marathon week of efforts to secure the votes. And he will need to navigate them both as he tries to pass any debt-limit agreement with Mr. Biden through the House.Catie Edmondson More

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    McCarthy Renews Call for Spending Cuts as Debt Talks Grind On

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    With a potential default just over a week away, a resolution remained elusive and Republican leaders told lawmakers they could return home for the holiday break.With a potential federal default just over a week away, a resolution to the debt limit crisis remained out of reach on Wednesday as White House and top Republican negotiators reported no breakthrough in another marathon day of discussions and members of Congress prepared to leave the capital for the holiday weekend.Negotiators met for roughly four hours on Wednesday afternoon at the White House and were silent upon leaving, which some regarded as a hopeful sign after days of public posturing from both sides. Representative Patrick T. McHenry, Republican of North Carolina and a key bargainer, rushed past reporters at the Capitol saying: “No news.”Speaker Kevin McCarthy stayed uncharacteristically close-lipped after the meeting ended, leaving the Capitol on Wednesday night without speaking to reporters. But he expressed cautious optimism, telling Fox Business that “things are going a little better.”“I think today they would say they’re making progress,” Mr. McCarthy said of the negotiators.With no deal imminent, Republican leaders told lawmakers they were free to return home for the Memorial Day weekend, but could be summoned back on short notice to vote. The announcement made clear that Mr. McCarthy and his deputies did not expect a resolution to avert a default to materialize until next week, just days from the projected June 1 deadline.At the same time, the speaker sought to reassure the markets that a deal could be reached.“I would not, if I was in the markets, be afraid of anything in this process,” he said. “I wouldn’t scare the markets in any shape or form. We will come to an agreement worthy of the American public, and there should not be any fear. Money is coming in every day.”Before the meeting, Mr. McCarthy sought to pressure President Biden and congressional Democrats to accept spending cuts to domestic programs in exchange for raising the debt limit and allowing the Treasury Department to avoid missing payments.“You have to spend less than you spent last year,” Mr. McCarthy said at a news conference in the Capitol as Biden administration and Republican negotiators gathered at the White House. “That is not that difficult to do. But in Washington, somehow that is a problem.”The administration has resisted cuts and instead pushed for a freeze on current spending levels. With Republicans insisting there be no cuts to defense or veterans’ programs, the brunt of the reductions would affect social programs that Democrats favor.Right-wing Republicans have vowed to oppose any compromise that retreats from cuts that were part of their debt-limit bill, which was approved last month along party lines, so Mr. McCarthy is likely to need a substantial number of Democratic votes to pass any agreement. But congressional Democrats are resisting cuts in the overall budget.Representative Pramila Jayapal of Washington, the chairwoman of the Progressive Caucus, said at a news conference that White House officials told her on Tuesday night that House G.O.P. negotiators had rejected proposals that could have reduced the deficit by $3 trillion, including closing tax loopholes and imposing new taxes on the highest earners. Mr. McCarthy has repeatedly said that Republicans will not accept any tax increases.“We will continue to call out and reject this reckless hostage-taking from extreme MAGA Republicans,” Ms. Jayapal said.In an effort to pressure Mr. McCarthy and other Republicans not to accept any deal that falls short of the House-passed bill, Representative Chip Roy of Texas, an influential hard-liner, released a memo asserting that every measure in the legislation was “critical.”“None should be abandoned solely for the quest of a ‘deal’,” Mr. Roy wrote.Many Democrats, too, were arguing against any compromise. Their leaders announced on Wednesday that the final two members of their caucus had signed a discharge petition aimed at bypassing Republican leaders and forcing debt-limit legislation to the floor. With their 213 signatures, Democrats would need at least five Republicans to break ranks and sign the petition for it to trigger such a vote. Democratic leaders called on Republicans to show that they are not allied with the most extreme wing of their party and help advance the petition to avert an economic catastrophe.“It does appear increasingly likely that House Republicans want a dangerous default, they want to crash the economy and they want to trigger a job-killing recession,” said Representative Hakeem Jeffries, Democrat of New York and the minority leader. “It’s my hope that five Republicans from New York or California or other moderate districts throughout the country can prove me wrong.”The House is set to begin a weeklong Memorial Day recess on Friday. Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the No. 2 Republican, advised lawmakers on Wednesday night that they should be prepared to return to the Capitol within 24 hours to approve a compromise bill. Mr. McCarthy has vowed to give lawmakers 72 hours to review any plan.Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen has warned repeatedly that the government could exhaust its ability to meet all of its obligations by June 1. More

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    Debt Limit Negotiators Debate Spending Caps to Break Standoff

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    The strategy, which was used in 2011, could allow both sides to save face but would most likely do little to chip away at the national debt.As negotiators for the White House and House Republican leaders struggle to reach a deal over how to raise the nation’s debt limit, a solution that harks back to old budget fights has re-emerged as a potential path forward: spending caps.Putting limits on future spending in exchange for raising the $31.4 trillion borrowing cap could be the key to clinching an agreement that would allow Republicans to claim that they secured major concessions from Democrats. It could also allow President Biden to argue that his administration is being fiscally responsible while not caving to Republican demands to roll back any of his primary legislative achievements.The Biden administration and House Republican leaders have agreed in broad terms to some sort of cap on discretionary federal spending for at least the next two years. But they are hung up on the details of those caps, including how much to spend on discretionary programs in the 2024 fiscal year and beyond, and how to divide that spending among the government’s many financial obligations, including the military, veterans affairs, education, health and agriculture.What could a spending cap deal look like?The latest White House offer would hold military and other spending — which includes education, scientific research and environmental protection — constant from the current 2023 fiscal year to next fiscal year, according to a person familiar with both sides’ proposals. That move would not reduce what is known as nominal spending, which simply means the level of spending before adjusting for inflation. Republicans are pushing to cut nominal spending in the first year.One reason the White House is willing to entertain holding spending essentially flat has to do with politics. Given that Republicans control the House, getting an increase in funding for discretionary programs outside the military would have been nearly impossible. Congress would not have approved increases through the appropriations process, the normal way in which Congress allocates money to government programs and agencies.Republicans have repeatedly said that they will not accept a deal unless it results in the government spending less money than it did in the last fiscal year. They have said that simply freezing spending at current levels, as the White House has proposed, does not enact the kind of meaningful cuts many in their party have long called for.But Republican negotiators have shown some flexibility around how long they would require those spending caps to last. House G.O.P. leaders are now looking to set spending caps for six years, rather than 10. Still, that is longer than the White House is proposing, with Democrats offering to cap spending for two years.“The numbers are foundational here,” Representative Garret Graves, Republican of Louisiana and one of Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s lead negotiators, said on Sunday. “The speaker has been very clear: A red line is spending less money and unless and until we’re there, the rest of it is really irrelevant.”The approach is evoking debt limit déjà vu.If spending caps sound familiar, that is because they were employed during the last big debt limit fight in 2011.During that episode of brinkmanship, lawmakers agreed to impose limits on both military and nonmilitary spending from 2012 to 2021. The Budget Control Act caps were somewhat successful at keeping spending in check, but not entirely.A Congressional Research Service report published this year noted that during the decade that the caps were in place, Congress and the president repeatedly enacted laws that increased the spending limits. Certain types of expenditures — for emergencies and military engagements — were exempt from the caps and the federal government spent $2 trillion over 10 years on those programs. And spending on so-called mandatory programs such as Social Security was not capped, and those make up about 70 percent of total government spending.Still, the Congressional Research Service pointed out that spending was lower each year from 2012 to 2019 than had been projected before the caps were put in place.The strategy is no fiscal panacea.Caps that limit spending around current levels will help slow the growth of the nation’s debt, but will not cure the government’s reliance on borrowed money.The Congressional Budget Office said this month that annual deficits — the gap between what America spends and what it earns — are projected to nearly double over the next decade, totaling more than $20 trillion through 2033. That deficit will force the United States to continue to rely heavily on borrowed funds.Marc Goldwein, the senior policy director for the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, estimated that it would require $8 trillion of savings over 10 years to hold the national debt to its current levels. However, he said that did not mean that enacting spending caps would not be worthwhile.“We’re not going to fix this all at once,” Mr. Goldwein said. “So we should do as much as we can, as often as we can.”The group has called for spending caps to be accompanied by spending cuts or tax increases as a plan to reduce the national debt.Spending caps are not the only issue.Finding an agreement on the extent and duration of spending caps will be a critical part of getting a deal.But negotiators are still working to resolve several other issues, including whether to put in place tougher work requirements for social safety net programs including food stamps, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families and Medicaid, and whether to expedite permitting rules for energy projects, two key Republican priorities that White House negotiators have shown some openness to.Jim Tankersley More

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    Debt Limit Talks Resume After Republicans Briefly Hit Pause

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    Republicans returned to the negotiating table on Friday hours after walking out, though talks lasted only about an hour.Negotiations between top White House and Republican congressional officials over a deal to raise the debt limit resumed on Friday just hours after House G.O.P. leaders said it was time to “press pause,” complaining that President Biden’s team was being unreasonable and that no progress could be made.The abrupt turn reflected the unwieldy state of negotiations over a bipartisan deal to avert a debt default that could occur as soon as June 1. Speaker Kevin McCarthy on Friday evening declared the talks were back on after venting frustration with the White House earlier in the day. Negotiations then broke up again Friday night roughly an hour after they resumed, and it was unclear when negotiators planned to meet again.The hourlong meeting capped a day of whiplash on Capitol Hill, as negotiators searching for a resolution to avoiding the first default in the nation’s history repeatedly restarted and ended discussions, and Republicans showed signs of increasing exasperation around negotiations on spending caps.“It’s very frustrating if they want to come into the room and think we’re going to spend more money next year than we did this year,” Mr. McCarthy, a California Republican, said on Fox Business on Friday evening, as he announced that his deputies would return to the negotiating table. “That’s not right, and that’s not going to happen.”Earlier in the day, Mr. McCarthy and one of his top advisers had declared that they were halting negotiations, saying that White House officials were refusing to budge on spending cuts. “We’ve got to get movement by the White House, and we don’t have any movement,” Mr. McCarthy said.His comments marked a departure from his tone just a day earlier, when he told reporters that he could see a path to reaching a deal in principle as early as the weekend.Still, the return to the negotiating table on Friday night underscored the mounting sense of urgency to find a resolution as Congress runs out of time to avoid the first default in the nation’s history, and the economic calamity that could follow.Once a deal is in hand, it will take time to translate it into legislation and pass it through Congress for Mr. Biden’s signature. Mr. McCarthy has promised his conference that he will give lawmakers 72 hours to read the bill before they vote on it.Republicans hinted that a major source of their frustration was how strictly to cap federal spending. The bill that House Republicans passed last month would raise the nation’s borrowing limit into next year in exchange for freezing spending at last year’s levels for a decade — which would lead to cuts of an average of 18 percent.The bill is a dead letter in the Democratic-controlled Senate, but the ultraconservative House Freedom Caucus declared on Thursday that Republicans should insist that it pass as is.“No more discussion on watering it down,” the group said in a tweet. “Period.”White House officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss private negotiations, acknowledged that there were significant differences between the parties, including around Mr. McCarthy’s stance on capping federal spending.Former President Donald J. Trump also weighed in on Friday on Truth Social, the social media website he founded, declaring that Republicans should not make a deal on the debt ceiling unless they get everything they want. “DO NOT FOLD!!!” he wrote.Negotiators were at odds over a handful of issues, including the extent to which a possible deal would include tougher work requirements for social safety net programs — a proposal that has drawn a backlash from progressive Democrats — and the length of any debt-limit extension.Conservatives in the House G.O.P. conference had grown increasingly concerned in recent days that Mr. McCarthy would agree to a deal freezing spending at current levels, rather than at last year’s levels, and would not lock in the kind of spending cuts for which they have long agitated.Zolan Kanno-Youngs More

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    If Debt Ceiling Standoff Can’t Be Resolved, Both Parties Will Share the Blame

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    While each party tries to blame the other for the crisis, some acknowledge that they would both share responsibility for a default.Is it the Biden default? Or the Republican Default on America?Even as negotiators push forward with halting talks to resolve the federal debt-ceiling standoff, members of both parties are positioning themselves to try to dodge the blame for the economic fallout if things go south. Democrats lambaste Republicans for taking the debt ceiling hostage to appease “extreme MAGA” conservatives bent on shrinking government spending. Republicans hit Democrats for waiting too long to open talks and not taking G.O.P. demands seriously.But deep down — and in some cases not so deep — officials in both parties know they are all going to pay if they don’t get a deal, the government defaults and Americans lose money and jobs and confidence about their financial well-being and future.“I would hate to be the politician trying to explain to people when the economy is in the toilet that it’s not my fault, it’s their fault,” said Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina. “Yeah, that ain’t going to work. They will flush us all.”Polls have suggested Mr. Graham’s view is correct. A Washington Post-ABC News Poll released earlier this month shows that the public is divided about who will bear the blame, with a significant chunk of independents saying the two sides should share it equally.And some on Capitol Hill say the political backlash will be well deserved if Congress and the White House manage to mangle the situation so badly that public officials careen into a completely avoidable crisis and send both the economy and the retirement accounts of millions of Americans reeling.“I can’t comprehend that anyone who had the ability to prevent this much damage to our country, our economy and our world standing would allow that to happen,” said Senator Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia, who had been among those pressing his party to engage in negotiations earlier. “It would be absolutely reprehensible. Everyone should get hammered.”But those likely reverberations haven’t yet motivated negotiators to come to an agreement and clear the way for an economic sigh of relief. Representative Garret Graves of Louisiana, the point man for House Republicans in the talks, abruptly exited a Friday negotiating session with administration representatives in the Capitol, accusing them of being “unreasonable,” and the talks were temporarily suspended. Suddenly, the path to a quick agreement that Speaker Kevin McCarthy had seen on Thursday was newly cluttered with obstacles. By the evening, talks had resumed.Such ups and downs in budget negotiations are fairly standard and can be performative as well as substantive. Both sides need to flex to show their respective forces that they are hanging tough and pushing for all they can get. But there are real differences in the positions of Democrats and Republicans on a host of issues on the bargaining table. A positive outcome is no certainty, despite regular high-level assurances that the United States cannot and will not default in the coming days.Still, should that occur, lawmakers and administration officials would like you to know that they didn’t do it.“Here we are on the brink of a Biden default,” Senator Shelley Moore Capito, Republican of West Virginia, declared this week both in person and via news release, sounding a refrain becoming increasingly popular with Republicans — that this was all Mr. Biden’s doing because he refused to engage with them earlier and allow enough time to work out an agreement.Not so, counter the Democrats. “We find ourselves in the midst of a G.O.P.-manufactured default crisis because House Republicans have chosen to try and hold our economy, our small businesses, everyday Americans hostage to unreasonable ransom demands,” Representative Hakeem Jeffries, Democrat of New York and the minority leader, said.Republicans have a retort. They argue that since they squeezed legislation through the House last month that would raise the debt limit and enact spending cuts, they have bragging rights as well as immunity from any criticism because they are the only ones who have acted thus far — though it was widely known the bill could never pass the Democratic-majority Senate.“I don’t know how we own it if we raised the debt limit,” Mr. McCarthy said at the White House when asked if he was ready to face the consequences for a default. His colleagues share his view.“In my district I don’t think it would be a huge problem,” said Representative Tom Cole, Republican of Oklahoma. “I did vote to raise the debt ceiling. Show me one person on the other side who did.”In addition, Republicans know it is traditionally the president who gets credit or fault for the state of the economy even if circumstances are well beyond control of the executive branch.Democrats scoff at the Republican claims. Senator Chuck Schumer, the New York Democrat and majority leader, dubbed the House legislation the Default on America Act, to try to capture both its impact and its dead-on-arrival status in the Senate. He and his fellow Democrats say they refuse to reward Republicans for what they view as highly irresponsible actions that are putting the nation’s economy at risk — even though both parties have used the debt limit for bargaining leverage over the years.“From the beginning, Democrats have said — I have said — that this process demands bipartisanship,” Mr. Schumer said this week. “It’s how we avoided default under President Trump. It’s how we have avoided default under President Biden, and it’s how we should avoid default this time too. Brinkmanship, hiding plans, hostage-taking — none of that will move us closer to a solution.”The two parties can continue to trade shots. But until they trade negotiating positions they can come to terms on, the threat of default hangs over Washington and the nation. And if that happens, those involved may find that the public won’t distinguish between who did or said what when, but will hold them all accountable. More

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    Meeting Between Biden and Republicans Delayed as Sides Pursue Debt Limit Deal

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    The decision to delay Friday’s expected meeting to next week was cast as a positive development, one that could allow officials to find agreement before the United States defaults on its debt.President Biden and top congressional leaders on Thursday postponed a second meeting on the debt limit crisis to give staff members more time to explore a budget deal before the two sides convened again.People familiar with the decision cast the move as a positive development. Preliminary budget talks among senior White House officials and congressional aides have been underway for two days, with both sides attempting to find a path to an agreement on lifting the government’s debt limit and avoiding a default.Mr. Biden and the four top congressional leaders, including Speaker Kevin McCarthy, were originally scheduled to meet again Friday after an initial face-to-face session on Tuesday produced no agreement. A new meeting is expected next week before Mr. Biden departs on Wednesday for Japan to attend the Group of 7 leaders meeting.The delay seems to suggest progress at a pivotal moment. Until now, both sides appeared dug in on their respective positions about what it would take to raise the nation’s debt limit, which caps how much money the United States can borrow. That $31.4 trillion limit was hit on Jan. 19, and the Treasury Department has been using accounting maneuvers to keep paying America’s bills without breaching that debt ceiling.Mr. McCarthy has insisted on deep spending cuts and a rollback of Mr. Biden’s clean energy agenda as a prerequisite to raising the debt limit. Mr. Biden has insisted that Republicans raise the borrowing cap, arguing it simply allows the United States to pay bills that Congress has already approved.House Republicans who have been pressing the White House and Senate Democrats to negotiate said on Thursday that the opening of discussions about spending limits and other proposals was spurring some optimism that an agreement could be reached before June 1.“The last 48 hours have given us some more reason for hope,” said Representative Dusty Johnson, Republican of South Dakota and the leader of the Main Street Caucus, an influential group of mainstream conservatives.Still, Mr. McCarthy downplayed the bargaining sessions, saying that with a June 1 deadline looming for a possible default, the pace was not fast enough.“We have a short time period,” Mr. McCarthy told reporters on Thursday. “If this were staff meetings happening on Feb. 1, I’d call them productive. When you are sitting here with a few, 15 days to go, it really seems to me that the president finally felt the pressure for 100 days of not having a meeting with me.”In the wake of Tuesday’s White House session, Biden administration representatives and congressional leadership offices have gathered in closed meetings on Capitol Hill to exchange ideas on a potential spending and policy deal.Congressional officials said it made sense to put off the higher-level meeting since Mr. Biden and congressional leaders would have little new to discuss so quickly after their last discussion. Among the concerns were that another meeting with little progress to report would sow doubts about Washington’s ability to prevent an economically devastating default.Both sides have continued to talk this week and people familiar with the discussion, which ran about two hours each on Wednesday and Thursday, said some broad areas of negotiation had emerged, including fixed caps on federal spending, reclaiming unspent funds designated for the Covid emergency, stiffer work requirements for federal benefits and expedited permitting rules for energy projects.The negotiations between Biden administration and congressional staff members, which Mr. Biden and Mr. McCarthy announced after the initial Tuesday meeting at the White House, represent a new frontier in the discussions over raising the debt limit. The talks are effectively an early version of annual budget discussions, which usually heat up in late summer. Given Mr. Biden’s pledge to not negotiate over an increase in the debt limit, administration officials have taken pains to describe them as the normal course of business.“That’s regular order,” White House spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre said Thursday, about the meetings. “That is something that has been done year after year to talk about appropriations.”But the timing of the discussions — and the fact that any agreement they produce would almost certainly be included in a bipartisan bill to raise the debt limit ahead of a potential default as soon as next month — suggests Mr. Biden is negotiating over the debt limit despite the insistence that the two issues are separate.The White House has sent staff members from the Office of Management and Budget and the National Economic Council to the talks, and the offices of the top two Democratic and Republican congressional leaders have dispatched aides with experience in fiscal policy and cutting major spending deals.As a starting point, administration officials have rejected any agreement with Mr. McCarthy that rolls back Mr. Biden’s signature legislative achievements, most notably on climate change. They are insisting Republicans drop significant provisions in the debt limit bill that passed the House last month, including the repeal of most of Mr. Biden’s new tax incentives for clean energy.On the narrower question of discretionary spending levels, administration officials are pushing for significantly smaller cuts than Republicans approved last month. They want shorter-term caps in spending than the decade-long caps in the Republican bill. And they want to base those caps off a higher spending level than Republicans do — the amount in this year’s government funding bill, which Mr. Biden signed in December. Republicans’ plan caps spending growth from the 2022 fiscal year.White House negotiators have also pushed to exclude consideration of Republican efforts to roll back funding for the Internal Revenue Service to crack down on tax cheats, as well as for work requirements for Medicaid and food stamp recipients.The duration of a debt limit increase is also emerging as a line in the sand, with the White House insisting on a higher increase than Republicans have floated. Both sides could agree to raise the limit for only a couple of months as they seek to finish budget negotiations. But Mr. Biden’s aides want to avoid such a short-term solution and do not want to conduct an entirely new round of negotiations next year. As a result, any larger budget deal would likely need to raise the limit for borrowing needs past the next presidential election, instead of into early next year, as the Republican bill did.Republicans acknowledge that the White House has laid down numerous red lines but say that the president will have to relent in some areas if an agreement is to be struck.“None of us, nobody in this room, thinks Joe Biden will get everything he wants in this deal,” said Mr. Johnson. “That means by definition he will have to accept a number of things he says he refuses to accept.”“We’re not going to negotiate with ourselves,” said Representative Garret Graves, a Louisiana Republican deputized by Mr. McCarthy to shepherd Republicans through the debt ceiling showdown. “We’re going to have substantial savings moving forward.”Biden administration officials are also open to striking a deal with Republicans on accelerating permitting for a wide range of energy projects, including wind, oil, gas and solar — a top priority of Senator Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia.Any final agreement would need the endorsement of both Mr. Biden, Mr. McCarthy and Senate Democrats, and final approval would most likely need to be bipartisan since many of the hard-right House conservatives who voted for the House debt limit increase said they would not support anything less than what the House passed.Officials also hope a final agreement could win approval from business groups, adding pressure on Republicans. Such concerns prompted U.S. Chamber of Commerce officials this month to outline potential paths to a debt limit deal. More

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    Biden Woos Republican Moderates in Debt Ceiling Standoff

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    A day after an unproductive meeting on the debt limit with Speaker McCarthy, the president assailed “extreme” Republicans who he said had “taken control of the House.”President Biden sought to drive a wedge among Republicans in their escalating dispute over spending and debt on Wednesday, effectively reaching out to moderates in hopes of convincing them to break away from Speaker Kevin McCarthy rather than risk triggering a national default that could throw the economy into a tailspin.Appearing in a competitive suburb with a vulnerable House Republican in his sights, Mr. Biden accused Mr. McCarthy of pursuing a radical strategy at the behest of the “extreme” wing of his party loyal to former President Donald J. Trump, putting the country in economic jeopardy in a way that he said reasonable Republicans of his own era in the Senate would not have done.“They’ve taken control of the House,” Mr. Biden said of this wing to a friendly audience at SUNY Westchester Community College in New York’s Hudson Valley. “They have a speaker who has his job because he yielded to the, quote, MAGA element of the party,” he added.Those hard-right Republicans, Mr. Biden said, are “literally, not figuratively, holding the economy hostage by threatening to default on our nation’s debt, debt we’ve already incurred, we’ve already incurred over the last couple hundred years, unless we give into their threats and demands.”The trip seemed aimed at least in part at peeling off even a few House Republicans to force the speaker’s hand. Legislation that Mr. McCarthy pushed through the House last month linking an increase in the debt ceiling to significant spending restraints passed with just one vote to spare, so even a relatively small mutiny would complicate Mr. McCarthy’s position.Mr. Biden singled out Representative Mike Lawler, a local Republican congressman sitting in the front row in the audience on Wednesday, praising him as a more rational member of his party. “Mike’s on the other team,” Mr. Biden said, “but you know what? Mike is the kind of guy that when I was in the Congress, there was a kind of Republican I was used to dealing with. He’s not one of these MAGA Republicans.”Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York, a fellow Democrat, greeted Mr. Biden in Westchester. The trip seemed aimed at least in part at peeling off even a few House Republicans to force Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s hand. Sarah Silbiger for The New York TimesThe president’s trip came a day after he hosted Mr. McCarthy and other congressional leaders at the White House to discuss the crisis. The session produced no breakthroughs, but the leaders agreed to have their staffs meet every day and to reconvene themselves on Friday.The federal government has reached the $31.4 trillion debt ceiling set by law and the Treasury Department estimates that it will run out of ways to avoid default as soon as June 1. Unless Congress acts by then, the nation will fail to pay its obligations for the first time in history, with potentially devastating consequences for an already fragile economy. Mr. McCarthy insists that any debt ceiling increase be tied to spending cuts, while Mr. Biden rejects linking the two; he has agreed to negotiate deficit controls separately.The annual deficit reached $1.375 trillion last year, up from $983 billion in 2019, the last year before the Covid-19 pandemic prompted vast relief spending, and is projected to double in the next decade. Even aside from the linkage with the debt ceiling, the two sides are drastically apart on how to address the red ink. Mr. Biden has proposed a budget that would reduce projected deficits by nearly $3 trillion over 10 years by increasing taxes on corporations and the wealthy, while Mr. McCarthy’s plan would scale back deficits by $4.8 trillion over a decade largely through cuts in discretionary programs.In speaking to a swing-voting New York suburb, Mr. Biden seemed to have two audiences — voters outside the capital who may not be paying as much attention to the debate and Mr. Lawler. A 36-year-old former political operative and first-term Republican, Mr. Lawler is an obvious target for the White House to try to sway. He ousted Representative Sean Patrick Maloney, then the chairman of House Democrats’ campaign operation, in a district that Mr. Biden won by 10 percentage points.In Washington, Mr. Lawler has positioned himself as a serious-minded moderate, breaking with his party on some cultural issues while supporting Mr. McCarthy’s debt ceiling and spending proposal. Both parties view him as one of the most vulnerable Republicans in 2024, and Democrats are already lining up millions of dollars and potential candidates to defeat him.For now, Mr. Lawler appears to be toeing a careful line between his party’s leaders and the president. When the White House reached out with an invitation to the event that many in the G.O.P. would have shunned, he promptly accepted. In media interviews before and after the speech, Mr. Lawler reiterated he would not support a default. But he also chastised Mr. Biden for not engaging with Mr. McCarthy sooner and insisted on broad spending cuts.Mr. Biden seemed to have two audiences: swing voters and Representative Mike Lawler, a first-term Republican, shown at left.Sarah Silbiger for The New York TimesAt this community college just a few hundred feet from his congressional district border, Mr. Lawler nodded politely when the president mentioned him while onstage on Wednesday. “I don’t want to get him in trouble by saying anything nice about him — or negative about him,” Mr. Biden said jokingly. “But thanks for coming, Mike. Thanks for being here. It’s the way we used to do it.”Speaking with reporters after the speech, Mr. Lawler said that he and Mr. Biden had a “very cordial” and “very frank” conversation backstage before the event. “He told me he wants me to know he wasn’t coming here to put pressure on me in any way,” said Mr. Lawler, who seemed to welcome the president’s remarks onstage about him not being a MAGA Republican. “You heard his comments today. I don’t think he put too much pressure on me.”Mr. Lawler reaffirmed his vote for Mr. McCarthy’s legislation. “We need to get our fiscal house in order,” he said. “And so yes, spending needs to be tied to the debt ceiling. And that is the message I conveyed to the president.” But he repeatedly called for a bipartisan solution.Local Democrats were frustrated that the president wooed Mr. Lawler rather than assail him. Mondaire Jones, a former congressman positioning himself to challenge Mr. Lawler next year, said after the speech that Mr. Lawler had done nothing to justify being described “as not being a MAGA Republican.” Mr. Jones added: “He has voted for everything Kevin McCarthy has asked him to vote for at the request of the MAGA extremists.”Indeed, Republicans seized on Mr. Biden’s comments to rebut the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s attacks on the G.O.P. congressman. “Despite the D.C.C.C.’s repeated lies regarding Congressman Lawler’s positions,” the National Republican Congressional Committee said in a statement, “Lawler is a pragmatic member of Congress who is working to negotiate and avoid a government default.” More