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US Could Face Debt-Ceiling Crisis This Summer Without Deal, Warns Budget Office

The Congressional Budget Office on Wednesday said the United States Treasury Department will exhaust its ability to pay its bills sometime between July and September unless the current $31.4 trillion cap on borrowing is raised or suspended.

In a report issued alongside its annual budget outlook, the nonpartisan budget office, also known as the CBO, cautioned that a historic federal debt default could occur before July if revenues flowing into the Treasury in April — when most Americans typically submit annual income tax filings — lag expectations.

The pace of incoming revenues, coupled with the performance of the U.S. economy in coming months, makes it difficult for government officials to predict the exact “X-date,” when the Treasury could begin to default on many debt payments without action by Congress.

“If the debt limit is not raised or suspended before the extraordinary measures are exhausted, the government would be unable to pay its obligations fully,” the budget office’s report said. “As a result, the government would have to delay making payments for some activities, default on its debt obligations, or both.”

Separately, the budget office said annual U.S. budget deficits will average $2 trillion between 2024 and 2033, approaching pandemic-era records by the end of the decade — a forecast likely to stoke Republican demands for more spending cuts.

More spending, higher costs to blame

The sobering analysis reflects the full impact of recent spending legislation, including investments in clean energy, semiconductors and higher military spending, along with higher health care, pension and interest costs. It assumes no change in tax and spending laws over the next decade.

“Over the long term, our projections suggest that changes in fiscal policy must be made to address the rising costs of interest and mitigate other adverse consequences of high and rising debt,” CBO Director Phillip Swagel said in a statement.

The need to raise the debt ceiling is driven by past spending laws and tax cuts, some enacted under Democratic President Joe Biden’s Republican predecessor, Donald Trump.

Republicans, who control the House of Representatives, want to withhold a debt limit increase until Democrats agree to deep spending cuts. In turn, Democrats say the debt limit should not be “held hostage” to Republican tactics over federal spending.

After hitting the $31.4 trillion borrowing cap on January 19, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said the Treasury can keep up payments on debt, federal benefits and make other outlays at least through June 5 using cash receipts and extraordinary cash management measures.

Year of the debt limit

So far in 2023, not a day has gone by on Capitol Hill without lawmakers jousting over the debt limit, as Democrats press for a quick, clean increase in Treasury borrowing authority and Republicans insist on first nailing down significant reductions in future government spending.

Social Security and Medicare, the government’s popular pension and health care programs for the elderly, are at the center of the debt limit and government funding debate, as both parties jockey to define the contours of the 2024 presidential and congressional election campaigns.

“There has been a Republican drumbeat to cut Social Security and Medicare,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, a Democrat, told reporters on Tuesday.

Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has labored, without much success so far, to smother such talk.

“Let me say one more time: There is no agenda on the part of Senate Republicans to revisit Medicare or Social Security. Period,” he said at a news conference.

Americans concerned

Most Americans do not closely follow Washington’s debt-ceiling saga, but they still worry it could hurt their finances, according to a Reuters/Ipsos public opinion poll conducted February 6-13.

Fifty-five percent of U.S. adults said they have heard little or nothing about the debate, but three-quarters of respondents said Congress must reach a deal because defaulting would add to their families’ financial stress, largely through potentially higher borrowing costs.
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Florida Education Fights Mirror National Controversies

For the past year, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has waged a struggle against what he sees as a left-wing bias in educational institutions in the United States. This week, he escalated the conflict, suggesting he might block popular Advanced Placement (AP) courses from being offered in Florida high schools.

The remarks came just a few days after the nonprofit College Board, which sets the curricula for the dozens of AP courses offered across the country, criticized DeSantis and his administration for blocking the rollout of a pilot AP course on African American history.

DeSantis is widely expected to seek the Republican presidential nomination in 2024, challenging former President Donald Trump and other contenders. Engaging in public battles with cultural institutions perceived by many conservatives as biased against them is keeping DeSantis’ name in the news, even though he has not officially announced his candidacy.

The only announced candidates, Trump and Republican former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, have both signaled that they, too, will make culture war politics part of their campaigns. This suggests that in the 17 months leading up to the Republican nominating convention in July 2024, American educational institutions can expect to be in the candidates’ crosshairs.

Haley and Trump

Haley, who officially announced her candidacy with a launch event on Wednesday, had already signaled her interest in wading into the education debates.

In a video released earlier in the week, she took aim at the 1619 Project, a program aimed at a broad rethinking of U.S. history with a focus on the effects of hundreds of years of slavery. The project, which has created curricula for high school students, has drawn the ire of conservatives.

In her video, with an image of the 1619 Project’s logo on screen, Haley says, “Some look at our past as evidence that America’s founding principles are bad. They say the promise of freedom is just made up. Some think our ideas are not just wrong, but racist and evil. Nothing could be further from the truth.”

In his first campaign event of the new year, Trump promised to fight “indoctrination” in U.S. schools. He also vowed to cut funding to schools that promote a “leftist” agenda. It’s not a topic that the former president had commonly addressed in the past, suggesting that he believes it’s going to be necessary for him to add it to the mix as he hits the campaign trail for 2024.

Series of fights

DeSantis’ tussle with the College Board is the latest in a series of his high-profile moves to challenge the existing educational system in Florida.

Last month, he took the controversial step of removing nearly half of the trustees at New College of Florida, a small, liberal arts institution in Sarasota that DeSantis accused of being biased against conservatives. He replaced the board members with conservatives tasked with turning the school into a beacon of conservative thought and principles.

Last year, DeSantis signed two bills aimed at elementary and high school education in Florida.

The Florida Parental Rights in Education Act, commonly known as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, restricted the ability of public school teachers in Florida to discuss LGBTQ issues in class. It led some schools to temporarily close their libraries for fear that some books might be found to be in violation of the law.

The Stop Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees (WOKE) Act took aim at instruction in schools and workplace training programs. Specifically, it targeted the teaching of topics such as the enslavement of Black Americans prior to the Civil War, and the suppression of their rights in southern states during the Jim Crow era.

Among other things, DeSantis and the bill’s supporters said it was meant to fight off “woke indoctrination” of students and to eradicate critical race theory, a more than 40-year-old academic concept that says racism is embedded in the U.S. legal system. CRT has become a catchall phrase among conservatives for curricula that point out racial disparities in the country.

AP controversy

AP courses, which allow high school students to earn college credits, are taught in public schools across the country. But the curricula for each of the dozens of different classes are developed by the College Board, a nonprofit organization that also administers well-known standardized tests, including the SAT for college and university entrance.

In 2021, the last year for which full data is available, 1.2 million U.S. public high school graduates — more than one in three — took at least one AP exam. A sufficiently high score on an AP exam is accepted as course credit by many colleges and universities, which can lower the costs of earning a college degree.

DeSantis’ fight with the College Board began last month, when the organization released a preliminary guide for a pilot program offering an AP course in African American history. The course covered a wide variety of issues, but included units on critical race theory, queer theory, and other issues to which DeSantis objected.

AP African American history

DeSantis also called into question the need for an African American history course, saying that state law mandates that African American history be taught as part of broader courses in U.S. history.

The Florida Department of Education released a statement saying it would bar public schools from using the curriculum, saying it is “contrary to Florida law and significantly lacks educational value.”

The College Board later released a significantly altered version of the curriculum that removed many of the units to which DeSantis had objected, earning it criticism for apparently giving in to the Florida governor.

The organization countered that the changes had already been under consideration and were not a capitulation to DeSantis. In a press release, it lashed out at the DeSantis administration, calling the Department of Education’s assessment of the course a “slander” and claiming that administration officials had twisted facts in order to “engineer a political win.”

The College Board did not reply to a request for comment on this story.

DeSantis replies

Speaking at a news conference in Jacksonville, Florida, this week, DeSantis took aim at the College Board.

“Who elected them?” he asked. “It’s not clear to me that this particular operator is the one that’s going to need to be used in the future.”

He said he is in favor of high school students being able to earn college credit, but pointed out that there are a number of other programs that make that possible.

“College credit? Yes. Having that available for everyone? Absolutely,” DeSantis said. “Does it have to be done by the College Board? Or can we utilize some of these other providers who I think have a really, really strong track record?”

Supporters cheer

DeSantis’s assault on the College Board in particular, and educational institutions in general, has delighted his supporters, Dan Backer, counsel for Ready for Ron, a political action committee supporting DeSantis for president, told VOA.

“Ron DeSantis is right. The College Board is shirking its duty to educate young Americans, choosing instead to play the ‘woke’ game and brainwash students with radical leftist propaganda,” he said.

On educational issues more broadly, he said, “Across America, parents and students deserve better, and Ron DeSantis knows it. He is once again showing what true leadership looks like, putting forth a common-sense education platform that prioritizes actual learning above all else — with no side helping of left-wing politics.”

Education advocates troubled

Eric Duncan of The Education Trust told VOA that his nonprofit organization — which works to break down racial and economic barriers to education — views DeSantis’ actions in Florida as a troubling reflection of a broader national trend toward stifling discussion of ugly parts of U.S. history.

“This is just part and parcel of that movement,” said Duncan, who directs the organization’s policy on preschool through high school education. “Our stance is really about trying to protect schools and classrooms from external attacks on the teaching of honest history and of conversations that are reflective of perspectives of different cultures and racial backgrounds.”

He added, “We need safe, supportive classrooms for students of color. Any efforts to censor the teaching of honest history is antithetical to that.”
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Trump Gets Republican Challenger for 2024 Presidential Election

At her first presidential campaign event on Wednesday, former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley told an enthusiastic crowd in Charleston that it is time for the country “to move past the stale ideas and faded names of the past.”

Haley did not mention former President Donald Trump, instead focusing her criticism on the nation’s current leader, Democrat Joe Biden.

“Our leaders are failing. No one embodies that failure more than Joe Biden,” she said.

To face Biden, however, Haley will need to get past Trump, who has already declared his candidacy, and numerous other expected Republican hopefuls.

Haley, ambassador to the United Nations in the Trump administration, is the first prominent Republican to launch a 2024 campaign to formally oppose her former boss. Her entry into the race reverses a promise she made.

“I would not run if President Trump does,” Haley told reporters on Dec. 4, 2021.

Through a campaign spokesperson, Trump, in a statement to VOA, noted Haley’s previous pledge and said he told her, “She should follow her heart and do what she wants to do,” adding, “I wish her luck!”

Haley, an accountant before entering politics, was relatively unknown in her home state when she made her initial successful run for governor in 2011. She would go on to serve a second term, when she raised her national profile by dealing with a mass shooting by a white gunman in a Black church and signing legislation to remove the Confederate flag from the grounds of the State House.

Haley said she was repeatedly underestimated in her previous political races, noting it was not always easy for her as a child in South Carolina, “a brown girl growing up in a Black and white world.” Haley is the daughter of Punjabi Sikh immigrants from India.

In her inaugural presidential campaign video, released Tuesday, Haley portrays herself as a face of the party’s future rather than one from its past.

“Republicans have lost the popular vote in seven out of the last eight presidential elections. That has to change,” says Haley, a point she also emphasized at Wednesday’s rally.

Haley, who is 51, told supporters at the campaign event there should be “mandatory competency tests for politicians over 75 years old.” Biden is 80. Trump turns 77 in June.

“As U.N. ambassador, she was loyal to President Trump and didn’t break with him as some of the Republican Party did. So those things, I think, would be on the positive side for a Republican voter looking at a new candidate. On the negative side, it’s not clear that she has as strong a lane or as strong an attraction to America, to Republican voters as some others,” says American Enterprise Institute senior fellow John Fortier. He describes Haley as “a dynamic figure.”

Haley’s candidacy declaration likely is just the first among Republicans seeking to thwart Trump’s return to the White House. Among those considering entering the race are three men who served in Trump’s administration — his vice president, Mike Pence, the former secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, and former national security advisor John Bolton.

“The big person we’re talking in this field as a potential alternative to Donald Trump is the governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis,” notes Fortier. “And I think the reasons for that is that he did portray, as a large-state governor in a Republican-leaning state, many of the characteristics of Donald Trump.”

The governor, who focuses on culture war issues as does Trump, is expected to dominate other Republican hopefuls in raising funds. That may make him attractive to party loyalists desiring a strong candidate to face Biden, the expected Democratic Party nominee.

If Haley continues to poll in the single digits, she is more likely to be considered as a running mate (vice presidential candidate) to the eventual party nominee.

Conservative media figures are mostly expressing skepticism, questioning the viability of her campaign and whether she’s a liberal in disguise.

“There’s a rule in politics that you never run for vice president,” said Federalist senior contributor Benjamin Weingarten, speaking on the conservative Newsmax TV channel. “The way the field will ultimately cull that’s the highest seat she could probably attain.”

Haley “is a liberal in outlook and mindset,” declared conservative lawyer Will Chamberlain on Twitter. “She is from South Carolina so she had to run as a Republican. But her views are ultimately formed by The New York Times and The Washington Post.”

The top Republican in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, is not playing favorites, predicting a vigorous primary process for his party.

“I think it’s going to be very, very competitive in these primaries and we’ll hope for the best and obviously I’m going to support whoever the nominee ultimately is,” he told reporters on Tuesday.

A crowd of candidates competing against the former president and each other could pave the way for Trump, who was twice impeached, to repeat what he did as a political newcomer in 2016 – having just enough support to clear the field and capture the Republican Party’s nomination.
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A Cold War on Two Fronts? No Thanks, Says Biden

Despite intense pressure from his Republican opposition, President Joe Biden appears intent on maintaining a measured response to the Chinese spy balloon that crossed the continental United States early this month.

The approach appears calibrated to avoid escalation with a second major adversary as his administration deals with Russia’s almost 1-year-old war on Ukraine.

John Kirby, the National Security Council coordinator for strategic communications, told reporters Tuesday the balloon drama does not change the fact that the administration intends to avoid a conflict and continues to seek open lines of communication with China.

Nothing has changed about the president’s desire “to move this relationship forward in a better place than it is right now,” Kirby said.

This despite Republican demands for a tougher stance on Beijing.

“[Biden] only shot down the Chinese spy balloon after public pressure demanded it,” said John Barrasso, a Republican senator from Wyoming, in a briefing Tuesday. “This is a complete violation of our integrity as a nation, and the president’s indifference and inaction showed weakness not just to China but to the world.”

U.S.-China tensions have been high since the discovery of the balloon that Biden ordered shot down on February 4. Administration officials say the device was part of an international “high-altitude balloon program for intelligence collection” by China’s People’s Liberation Army. Beijing maintains it was a civilian airship used for meteorological research.

Kirby said the administration’s approach to its adversaries has not changed, pointing to the National Security Strategy released in October that identifies the main U.S. strategic challenges as competition with China and Russia in shaping the global order, while working with allies and adversaries alike on transnational problems such as climate change, food insecurity, energy shortages and inflation.

“I’m committed to work with China where we can advance American interests and benefit the world,” Biden said in his State of the Union address this month, just days after he ordered his military to shoot down the spy balloon. “But make no mistake about it: as we made clear last week, if China threatens our sovereignty, we will act to protect our country. And we did.”

Incentive to avoid escalation

Biden has incentives to avoid escalation with China. His administration is already seeking to manage the NATO response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine while facing other foreign policy challenges, including North Korean and Iranian nuclear programs, and a volatile Middle East following the formation of an extremely right-wing Israeli government under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The administration has committed more than $27.1 billion in security assistance to Kyiv since the war started on February 24, 2022, and it is mindful not to provoke Beijing to further side with Moscow.

Beijing has spread Moscow’s anti-Western propaganda and ramped up trade with Russia, but it has not provided direct military support for Putin’s war effort — nor has it helped his government and banks to evade tough Western sanctions.

“One of the key areas where the Biden administration wants to talk to Beijing is making sure that it stays out of the war in Ukraine, that Beijing does not provide any kind of political, military support for Russia,” Erik Brattberg, senior vice president in the Europe practice at Albright Stonebridge Group, told VOA.

With China’s top diplomat Wang Yi scheduled to fly to Moscow this week and President Xi Jinping expected to follow within the next few months, analysts say the administration is left with limited options.

“The best the United States can hope for is to effectively deal with the immediate threat Russia poses and weaken Russia to the point where it cannot pose a major military threat to its neighbors, and then turn its attention to the far more serious challenge China poses,” said David Sacks, research fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

“The biggest issue, in my view, is the stress that the war in Ukraine is putting on the U.S. defense industrial base, which is seriously unprepared for a direct conflict with China,” Sacks told VOA.

“Unless the Biden administration addresses this issue with urgency and significantly ramps up production of critical munitions and weapons, the United States will be extremely vulnerable if China uses force against Taiwan in the coming years.”

Beijing is also making overtures to another U.S. adversary – Iran. Chinese President Xi Jinping was in Tehran on Tuesday, defending the Islamic Republic’s right to safeguard its rights and interests, according to Chinese state media.

“What we see emerging is a longterm competition between the global West — U.S., EU, and developed democracies — and China, Russia, Iran, and a few other nations that resent the global West’s domination of international systems,” said Robert Daly, director of the Wilson Center’s Kissinger Institute on China and the United States.

Hot-button issue

Several Republican politicians have used the incident to raise campaign contributions, at once attacking Biden and Beijing, according to Pundit Analytics, which tracks communications and social-media postings of elected officials and candidates.

With Republicans helping to stoke voters’ anger, the balloon is becoming a hot-button political issue. Ordinary Americans who had been largely ignoring U.S.-China tensions are now beginning to realize what many in the foreign policy circle agree on – that the U.S. has been on a cold war footing with China for a while now, Daly told VOA.

“This is the real significance of the spy balloon — not that it poses a new threat to the U.S., but that more Americans are signing on to the ‘China Threat’ narrative that had formerly been limited to Washington,” Daly said.

Should Biden decide to run again in 2024 as his officials say he intends to, observers say the political cost of appearing soft on China will be even greater.

VOA Congressional Correspondent Katherine Gypson contributed to this report.
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California Senator Feinstein Says She Won’t Run for Reelection

Democratic U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein announced Tuesday that she will not seek reelection in 2024, signaling the end of a groundbreaking political career spanning six decades in which she shattered gender barriers and left a mark on political battles over reproductive rights, gun control, and environmental protection.

“I am announcing today I will not run for reelection in 2024 but intend to accomplish as much for California as I can through the end of next year when my term ends,” Feinstein said in a statement.

“Even with a divided Congress, we can still pass bills that will improve lives. Each of us was sent here to solve problems. That’s what I’ve done for the last 30 years, and that’s what I plan to do for the next two years. My thanks to the people of California for allowing me to serve them.”

Feinstein was first elected to the Senate in 1992 and is the oldest member of Congress.
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Biden Fires Architect of the Capitol Over Alleged Abuses

Report says Brett Blandon misused his government vehicle and misrepresented himself as a law enforcement official
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