Twelve Years of the Debt Crisis: When President Biden and the White House Confidered about a Possible Debt Short-Term Extension
Twelve years later, the government is again at risk of defaulting on its debt for the first time, and Republicans in the House are again demanding spending cuts in exchange for agreeing to raise the debt limit.. Mr. Biden is determined to raise the debt limit in its entirety while at the same time remaining within his budget, advisers say.
They have not always been the case. Republicans have pointed out in recent weeks that, as a senator, Mr. Biden railed against budget deficits during the Reagan presidency. He had a proposal to stop federal spending for a year. He said his plan would “shock the living devil out of everyone in the U.S. Senate,” but it went nowhere.
When negotiating for the Obama administration, Mr. Biden tied the debt limit and budget issues. In remarks to reporters on Tuesday, Mr. Biden suggested that he only did that because he had been instructed to get a deal done.
“I got a call that morning at 6 o’clock saying that the Republican leader would only talk to me, and there was no time left,” he said. “And so I sat down, and I got instructions from the White House to settle it. And that was my job. But I had no notice.”
In the spring of 2011, Mr. Biden and a bipartisan group of congressional leaders met frequently to hash out their differences. In early meetings, the group gathered at Blair House, where foreign dignitaries stay when they visit Washington. That summer, Mr. Boehner broke off negotiations, in large part because rank-and-file Republicans would not agree to raise taxes on the wealthy. The deal left Mr. Obama to explain to voters why he was able to agree to spending cuts while not being able to raise taxes.
McCarthy has opposed it many times and Johnson told reporters that it is off the table. But he agreed with Yellen’s timeline for acting and said “default would be terrible for our country.”
The Treasury Secretary has set a deadline in June for when the government will be able to pay its bills, and some are floating the idea of a short-term extension of the debt limit.
Progress on bipartisan reforms of the U.S. debt-limit deal in a three-way meeting with Biden and other senior officials
Graves said he has talked to senior Biden administration officials like climate envoy John Kerry, who agree about the need for permitting reforms. He said there is a group of House and Senate Democrats — including West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin — who support changes to the current system. Graves thinks the proposal in the GOP bill is a good start.
One senior Democratic aide told NPR that pulling back COVID funds that haven’t been spent is something the president has said he is open to including in a deal.
Graves told reporters earlier Thursday that he believed they could find common ground around the four areas.
Louisiana Republican Mike Johnson told NPR that he’s cautiously optimistic about the state of play. Johnson said, “that’s important because the staffs are still meeting and negotiating and they know that so those are necessary sequential steps in making it all happen.”
This is a positive thing. The meetings are progressing. Staff is continuing to meet and it wasn’t the right moment to bring it back to principals,” said the source, who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe private meetings.
A source familiar with the meetings told NPR that Biden and the congressional leaders postponed their gathering because did not want interrupt the progress that was being made.
Biden was set to meet McCarthy, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer at the White House to continue talks on lifting the nation’s debt limit, which expires as soon as early June. An meeting on Tuesday ended with no resolution.