Donald Trump has threatened lawmakers with a costly and perhaps fatal government shutdown unless Congress ups the debt ceiling or eliminates limits to federal government borrowing altogether.
“We’re not going to fall into the debt ceiling quicksand,” Trump told US media Thursday. “There won’t be anything approved unless the debt ceiling is done with,” he warned.
The president-elect warned the US could be thrust into an economic depression if government spending exceeded limits set out by Congress – something expected to happen in the coming months – soon after he takes office in January.
“By doing what I’m doing, I put it into the Biden administration,” Trump said, adding that the issue should be resolved by the outgoing administration, not his own.
“The interesting thing is, [the debt ceiling] possibly means nothing, or it means [the] Depression of 1929,” Trump warned, stressing that “psychologically it may mean a lot” if the government ran out of money and stopped paying on its obligations.
“In other words, it doesn’t have a real meaning other than you’ve violated something. And that may be just, one day, half a story, or it may lead to the Depression of 1929 and nobody wants to take the chance, except the Democrats,” Trump said.
Lawmakers have until Friday to approve must-pass legislation to keep the federal government up and running, or face a shutdown. A proposed House vote on spending, which would have kept the government funded into mid-March 2025, was canceled Wednesday night.
“Shutdowns only inure to the person who’s president,” Trump emphasized, noting he “tried to teach” former Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy that fact, but “obviously didn’t do a very good job [with] a shutdown because he kept giving [Trump’s adversaries] extensions into my territory.”
Democrats have accused Trump and Republicans of “playing politics with this bipartisan agreement.”
The debt ceiling plagues the US government on a regular basis, with Republicans and Democrats playing high-level political brinksmanship nearly each time a must-pass funding bill comes around. The debt ceiling was first introduced by Congress during the First World War, ballooning by over 2400% and the limit raised more than a hundred times since then.
The ability to incur massive debts, combined with the dollar’s status as the world’s de facto reserve currency, have traditionally allowed the US government to spend significantly more than it collects in tax revenues to fund things like the defense budget, Medicaid, Medicare education and foreign aid. However, some economists fear that current debt (over $36 trillion and counting) is unsustainable, and that the dollar’s status as a reserve for state-to-state trade may be coming to an end, thanks in large part to Washington’s own policies of incurring debt and weaponizing the greenback.