Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the US “is never going to default” as the deadline for increasing the federal debt ceiling gets closer.
“That is never going to happen,” Bessent said in an interview for CBS’s Face the Nation scheduled to air Sunday. “We are on the warning track and we will never hit the wall.”
Republican congressional leaders have attached an increase in the debt limit to President Donald Trump’s tax and spending bill, which potentially puts avoiding a default at the mercy of complex negotiations over the legislation. The US Senate returns this week to take up the bill.
“We don’t give out the ‘X date’ because we use that to move the bill forward,” Bessent said. Last month, Bessent told lawmakers that the US was likely to exhaust its borrowing authority by August if the debt ceiling isn’t raised or suspended by then.
Wall Street analysts and private forecasters see the deadline falling sometime between late August and mid-October.
“I’ve known Jamie for a long time, and for his entire career he’s made predictions like this,” he said. “Fortunately none of them have come true.”
“We are going to bring the deficit down slowly,” Bessent said. “This has been a long process, so the goal is to bring it down over the next four years.”
