Trump says he now supports elimination of federal debt ceiling
President-elect Donald Trump now wants to eliminate the statutory debt limit entirely after pushing Republicans to hold the nation’s credit hostage under Democratic presidents.
Under Democratic presidents, Donald Trump repeatedly demanded Republicans in Congress use the federal debt ceiling as leverage for their political demands. Now, as he prepares to return to the White House, Trump is calling for the elimination of the cap on government borrowing.
The United States government has accumulated more than $36 trillion in debt, about $8 trillion of which came during Trump’s first term in office. To pay interest on that and for current spending obligations, the Treasury must take on more debt each year. Rather than increase revenues or cut spending to eliminate the annual budget deficit and pay off the debt, Congress sets a cap on how much the government may borrow.
“The debt limit does not authorize new spending commitments,” the Treasury Department explains on its website. “It simply allows the government to finance existing legal obligations that Congresses and presidents of both parties have made in the past.”
Congressional Republicans have frequently used the cap as a bargaining chip, threatening to let the government default on its debts if Democrats do not agree to such demands as cuts to health care subsidies and climate infrastructure programs. The standoffs have caused market uncertainty and scared credit rating agencies, increasing government borrowing costs by billions of dollars and leading Standard & Poor’s and Fitch to downgrade the nation’s long-term debt rating.
In a telephone interview with NBC News on Dec. 19, 2024, the president-elect called for Congress to eliminate the statutory cap on how much debt the Treasury Department can accumulate, saying it was “the “smartest thing it could do. I would support that entirely. The Democrats have said they want to get rid of it. If they want to get rid of it, I would lead the charge.”
The Trump transition team did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In December 2021, Congress set the debt limit at $31.381 trillion. A bipartisan law enacted in June 2023 suspended that limit until January 2025. With that freeze set to expire, Trump unsuccessfully pushed Congress to attach another increase in December 2024, before President Joe Biden leaves office, to a must-pass stopgap spending agreement. “The Democrats must be forced to take a vote on this treacherous issue NOW, during the Biden Administration, and not in June,” he posted on social media. “They should be blamed for this potential disaster, not the Republicans!”
In the past, however, Trump has egged on the GOP’s harmful debt limit showdowns under Democratic presidents.
“With the debt limit approaching, @GOP has even more leverage,” he tweeted in 2013. “If they stay united and on message they can win.”
“REPUBLICANS CAN GET ALMOST EVERYTHING BACK THAT ‘THE OLD BROKEN CROW,’ MITCH McCONNELL, AND THE REAL ‘LEADER,’ CHINA CENTRIC COCO CHOW, STUPIDLY GAVE UP TO THE DEMOCRATS OVER THE LAST TWO YEARS, BY SIMPLY PLAYING TOUGH IN THE UPCOMING DEBT CEILING NEGOTIATIONS,” he wrote in January 2023 on Truth Social, misspelling the name of McConnell’s wife, Elaine Chao, who had served in Trump’s Cabinet. “WITH THE ‘RIGHT’ NEGOTIATORS, LIKE ALL OF THOSE INVOLVED THE OTHER NIGHT (ON BOTH SIDES!) FOR SPEAKER, IT WILL BE A BEAUTIFUL AND JOYOUS THING FOR THE PEOPLE OF OUR COUNTRY TO WATCH. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!”
Though Trump ran in 2016 on a promise to quickly balance the budget and pay off the national debt, he did not accomplish those things as president. According to the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, the tax cuts and tariffs he promised in his 2024 campaign would add between $1.65 trillion and $15.55 trillion more to the national debt over the next decade.
Not all Republicans in Congress are lining up behind Trump’s latest strategy. Newsweek reported on Jan. 5 that, asked on Fox News whether he would back elimination of the debt limit, Wisconsin Republican Sen. Ron Johnson said: “No, we absolutely need a debt ceiling limit. I’ll negotiate in terms of how far we increase that. There are all kinds of things we could do, but it starts with, again, going back to a baseline spending this reasonable amount as part of the negotiation on increasing debt limit. But we absolutely need that debt limit, or there’s no control over out-of-control government spending.”
