WASHINGTON (AP) — Crucial debt ceiling negotiations are still far from success, but a deal is possible by the end of the week, Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy said after a brief meeting Tuesday with President Biden and other congressional leaders at the White House.
Meanwhile, Biden is cutting short his upcoming foreign trip because of the looming debt limit crisis, adding urgency to the talks. McCarthy said one new development is that the president has “changed the scope” of who is negotiating in the staff conversations that have been slow-going over the past week.
“It is possible to get to a deal by the end of the week,” McCarthy told reporters.
Tuesday’s meeting was pivotal as negotiators were staring down a June 1 deadline, which is when the Treasury Department says the U.S. could begin defaulting on its debts.
Biden is cutting short his planned trip to Japan, Papua New Guinea and Australia, set to begin Wednesday. He will still attend a G-7 summit in Japan but is canceling the later stops, according to three people with knowledge of the decision who were granted anonymity to discuss the unannounced decision.
Biden met with the congressional leaders in the Oval Office.
“We’re just getting started,” Biden he said in brief remarks to reporters, while others in the meeting — Vice President Kamala Harris, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky. — sat soberly.
Biden will still attend the Group of Seven summit in Hiroshima, Japan, as planned but canceled the later stops ould cancel the later stops. Kirby noted that Biden will already have met with some of the leaders of the so-called “Quad” — the purpose of the Australia leg of the visit — while in Japan, even as he cautioned that no final decisions have been made.
“We wouldn’t even be having this discussion about the effect of the debt ceiling debate on the trip, if Congress would do its job, raise the debt ceiling the way they’ve always done,” Kirby said.
While Biden has remained upbeat that “we’ll be able to do this,” McCarthy has prodded the president to move faster and has been far more pessimistic on the state of the talks. He and other Republicans are demanding budget cuts in exchange for their support for raising the debt ceiling. Biden insists the two issue must not be linked.
“How much is too much?” McCarthy said Tuesday about the nation’s $31 trillion debt load, as he pushed for stricter work requirements on government aid recipients as a way to cut spending.
McCarthy stopped short of suggesting Biden cancel his trip abroad. But he said at the Capitol, “We’ve got 16 more days to go, I don’t think I’d spend eight days out of the country.”
Even as the Democratic president and the Republican speaker box around the politics of the issue — with Biden insisting he’s not negotiating over the debt ceiling and McCarthy working to extract spending cuts — various areas of possible agreement appeared to be emerging.
Talks have been under way at the Capitol for much of the past week, closed-door discussions where White House and congressional staff are discussing what it would take to craft a budget deal that would unlock a separate vote to lift the nation’s borrowing capacity to avoid a devastating default.
Among the items on the table: clawing back some $30 billion in untapped COVID-19 money, imposing future budget caps, changing permit regulations to ease energy development and putting bolstered work requirements on recipients of government aid, according to those familiar with the talks.
But congressional Democrats are growing concerned about the idea of putting new work requirements for government aid recipients on the table after Biden suggested he may be open to such changes. The White House remains opposed to changes in requirements for recipients of Medicaid and food stamp programs, although it is more open to revisions for beneficiaries of the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families cash assistance program.