“I’m confident we’ll get the budget approved and America won’t default,” Biden added from the Roosevelt Room of the White House. He added that he and members of Congress would agree “because there is no alternative.”
The president’s remarks came ahead of his departure from Washington for the G7 summit in Hiroshima, Japan, and a day after he held his second Oval Office meeting with congressional leaders to discuss how to avoid default.
Speaker and Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy has assigned a number of negotiators to try to reach a final agreement. They include Steve Richetti, adviser to the president, Louisa Terrell, director of legislative affairs, Shalanda Young, director of the Office of Management and Budget, and Rep. Garrett Graves, a close Republican ally of McCarthy.
“I think at the end of the day we don’t want a default,” McCarthy told “Squawk Box” on Wednesday. “The problem is that the deadline is very short.”
Congressional Republicans are demanding that Biden agree to a significant cut in budget spending first, before agreeing to raise the debt ceiling by $31.4 trillion, a move that would allow the government to borrow more money .
In contrast, President Joe Biden insists Congress has a constitutional duty to raise the debt ceiling unconditionally to pay for previously approved spending.
The US government had already reached the statutory borrowing limit in January, and since then the Treasury Department has used special accounting measures to make cash available. US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen told Congress those measures could expire on June 1.
This was confirmed by the US Congressional Budget Office, which said last Friday that there is a “high probability” that the United States will not meet its obligations in the first two weeks of June unless it raise the debt ceiling, and that uncertainty will persist over payments throughout May.
The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund have warned that failure by the United States to meet its obligations will pose great risks to the global economy.
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