President-elect Trump said Thursday he would support abolishing the debt ceiling as he pushed the issue to the center of government spending talks with just days to avert a shutdown.
Trump told NBC News in an interview that the “smartest thing” lawmakers could do would be to get rid of the debt ceiling. A day earlier, Trump had said lawmakers must raise the debt ceiling as part of any agreement to fund the government.
“The Democrats have said they want to get rid of it. If they want to get rid of it, I would lead the charge,” Trump told NBC News.
The president-elect argued the debt ceiling “doesn’t mean anything, except psychologically.” The debt ceiling puts a cap on how much the federal government can borrow to pay its existing expenses, but it does not authorize new spending.
President Biden and then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) reached a deal in May 2023 to raise the debt ceiling for two years and apply new caps on federal spending over the same duration.
That would put the issue on Trump’s plate in June of next year, when he and Republicans are hoping to extend tax cuts that were first passed in 2017.
Trump and his allies have torpedoed a roughly 1,500-page bill unveiled Tuesday evening that was a compromise between congressional leaders to extend government funding into March and provide money for various other priorities.
GOP opposition was centered on a number of add-ons to the continuation of government funding through March 14.
While Trump has expressed opposition to the inclusion of lawmaker pay raises and other provisions, he has become increasingly focused on the issue of the debt ceiling, seeking to avoid any kind of standoff on the topic when he is in office next year.
Bharat Ramamurti, a former economic adviser in the Biden White House, argued Democrats should use the standoff to push for the elimination of the debt ceiling.
“Democrats never use the debt limit to extract policy concessions from Republicans,” Ramamurti posted on the social platform X. “Its only purpose is for the GOP to threaten the global economy to extract concessions from Democrats. Let’s end this farce and notch a win for economic stability in the process.”
