Trump wants to extend US debt ceiling, says he doesn’t want to see a default

2:48 pm Tuesday, January 07th, 2025

PALM BEACH, Florida (Reuters) -President-elect Donald Trump said on Tuesday that he wants the U.S. Congress to extend the nation’s debt ceiling, adding that he did not want to see the federal government default on its debt, which currently tops $36 trillion.

“I just don’t want to see a default. That’s all I want,” Trump told reporters at his Florida resort.

The last congressional suspension of the debt ceiling, agreed to in 2023, expired at the end of the year, and since then the Treasury Department has been using extraordinary measures to avert default. 

Those measures could stave off a default for several more months, but Congress by the middle of this year likely would have to pass legislation addressing the debt ceiling.

The debt ceiling has not achieved its nominal purpose — limiting borrowing — but has been the subject of periodic brinkmanship in Congress, spooking financial markets by flirting with the risk of a destabilizing default.

Just last month, Trump torpedoed a bipartisan stopgap spending bill by insisting Congress raise the debt ceiling — or simply eliminate it — before outgoing Democratic President Joe Biden’s term in office expires on Jan. 20.

House Republicans did not have the votes to meet Trump’s demands.

For several weeks now, congressional Republicans and Trump have gone back and forth on whether to try to pass his legislative agenda in one massive bill or two smaller ones. Either way, Republicans would use a procedural tool called reconciliation to sidestep Democratic opposition in the Senate.

No. 2 House Republican Steve Scalise on Tuesday told reporters that his party’s lawmakers “plan to move forward on a single reconciliation bill” that would aim to boost border security and clamp down on immigrants in the United States while also extending 2017 tax cuts and raising fossil fuel production.

Scalise added, however, that if Trump prefers to split the legislation into two bills that also was a possibility.

Trump noted at his press conference that two bills could be preferable.

(Reporting by Steve Holland in West Palm Beach, Florida, and Tim Reid and Richard Cowan in Washington; Editing by Scott Malone and Cynthia Osterman)