15 is a particularly important date because the Treasury Department is required to make a $118 billion payment to the Highway Trust Fund. The Bipartisan Policy Center said that there was additional uncertainty surrounding the debt limit this year because of the pandemic and the various economic relief programs that are still ongoing.ĭec. Representative Kevin McCarthy, Republican of California and the minority leader, warned on Friday that such a maneuver could tank passage of the entire package. Other officials have floated attaching legislation raising the debt limit to the sprawling annual defense policy bill, which is the last major must-pass piece of legislation that lawmakers plan to approve in December.īut it is unclear whether such a plan would be successful: Attaching a debt ceiling increase could jeopardize the Republican votes needed to counter the bloc of liberal Democrats who typically oppose the defense bill in protest of military spending.

Some lawmakers, however, may be unwilling to hand that power to the White House or lose a cudgel often used by the minority party to exert pressure, particularly while 60 votes are needed to end a filibuster in the Senate. Republicans continue to publicly insist that Democrats must act alone to address the issue, while Democrats have countered that raising the borrowing cap is a shared responsibility given that both political parties have incurred big debts over the last several years.Īides in both parties, while cautioning that a solution has not been agreed to, noted that party leaders had so far refrained from publicly trading blame over the issue.Īs a way of navigating around the impasse, some officials have discussed the possibility of handing the authority of raising the debt limit to the administration, while granting Congress the ability to disapprove the decision with just a simple majority. While lawmakers have not settled on a path to lifting the borrowing cap, they are exploring a series of ways to raise it, including some that could ultimately hand more power to the White House to avoid the kind of standoffs that have routinely crippled Washington. The projection from the think tank, the Bipartisan Policy Center, was a narrower window than it provided last month, and the nonpartisan group suggested that the actual deadline, or X-date, could be toward the earlier end of that range.ĭemocrats and Republicans appear to have tempered their tone around raising the debt limit this time around. 28 if Congress does not act to raise or suspend the debt ceiling, a Washington think tank warned on Friday. The United States faces a default sometime between Dec.

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