As President-elect Trump pushed the issue to the center of government budget talks on Thursday, he reportedly stated that he would want to support the elimination of the debt ceiling.
There are only a few days left to prevent a shutdown of the government.
Over the course of an interview with NBC News, President Trump stated that the “smartest thing” that lawmakers could do would be to eliminate the debt ceiling.
“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 said during the interview.
The previous day, President Trump had stated that in order for Congress to reach an agreement to fund the government, they must first increase the debt ceiling.
An argument was made by the incoming president that the debt ceiling is meaningless, except from a psychological standpoint.
Despite the fact that it does not sanction any additional spending, the debt ceiling places a limit on the amount of money that the federal government can borrow in order to cover its existing expenditures.
In May of 2023, President Biden and speaker Kevin McCarthy, who was a Republican from California at the time, came to an agreement to lift the debt ceiling for a period of two years and to impose new spending limits on the federal government for the same period of time.
Because of this, the matter would be brought to the attention of President Trump in June of the following year, when he and Republicans are trying to prolong tax cuts that were initially enacted in 2017.
A package that was a compromise between congressional leaders to extend government funding until March and provide money for a variety of other initiatives has been sabotaged by Trump and his friends.
The bill, which was approximately 1,500 pages long and was presented to the public on Tuesday evening, was derailed.
The resistance from the Republican Party was concentrated on a series of add-ons to the agreement to continue funding the government through March 14.
[READ MORE: Trump Advocates for Abolishing Debt Ceiling]
