Democrats flip the script, eyeing debt limit to block Trump’s agenda

DORAL, Florida — Democrats in Congress are considering forcing a showdown over the debt limit to rein in President Donald Trump’s vast plans to reshape the U.S. economy and remake the federal government.

For 30 years, Republicans have used the threat of a national default to make Democrats negotiate over GOP demands. But as America hurtles once again toward a potential debt crisis, Democrats see an opportunity to turn the tables to cut off Trump’s agenda and take the debt limit off the table in future legislative battles.

Last week, the national debt hit the legal limit of $31.4 trillion. (The debt limit does not directly cut spending, but it bars the country from borrowing more money to pay for spending Congress has already approved.) Unless Congress acts to lift or suspend the cap, Trump’s Treasury Department will be forced to stop borrowing sometime this spring. That could trigger a calamitous default, probably tanking the U.S. economy and causing a global crisis.

Republicans control both chambers of Congress as well as the White House and could lift the debt limit on their own. But internal divisions over spending block that path. As the House GOP huddles this week at Trump’s golf resort in Doral to try to resolve their differences, Republican leaders recognize they are likely to need Democratic votes to raise the debt limit — and Democrats know it.

“It’s inevitable that they’re going to need us,” Rep. Richard E. Neal (D-Massachusetts) told The Washington Post.

The question for Democrats is what they want in exchange.

It’s a stark role reversal in Washington. Republicans have been weaponizing the debt limit since at least 1995, when House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Georgia) threatened to let the government default unless President Bill Clinton gave in to his budget demands. Gingrich ultimately backed down, but House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) picked up the cudgel in 2011, pushing the nation to the brink of a catastrophe that roiled financial markets. The country was two days from default when Boehner cut a deal with President Barack Obama to raise the debt limit and slash spending.

Since then, Republicans have repeatedly held the debt limit hostage to secure their demands, including in 2023, when they forced President Joe Biden to claw back investments in the Internal Revenue Service.

Through it all, Democrats have repeatedly pushed for no-fuss increases in the borrowing limit, arguing that demanding concessions in exchange for preventing a debt crisis was completely irresponsible.

Now that they’re out of power, however, Democrats say they should seize on this year’s deadline as an opportunity to abolish the debt limit — or suspend it for decades — as some in their ranks have been arguing for years.

With Trump, they may have a willing negotiating partner, even if his own party is less eager to cut a deal.

Even before he was sworn in for a second term, the president in December ordered Republicans to raise the debt ceiling as part of a government funding bill, crashing already tenuous negotiations between House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) and members of the party’s hard-right flank, some of whom have never voted for a debt ceiling increase.

“Congress must get rid of, or extend out to, perhaps, 2029, the ridiculous Debt Ceiling,” he posted on social media at 1:16 a.m., on the day of the government shutdown deadline; 2029, of course, is the year he’ll leave office. “Without this, we should never make a deal. Remember, the pressure is on whoever is President.”

But House Republicans couldn’t unite behind Trump’s demand, with many refusing to suspend the borrowing cap without corresponding spending cuts. Then-Vice President-elect JD Vance, still in the Senate, and Russell Vought, Trump’s pick to lead the White House budget office, helped craft an intra-GOP compromise in which Republicans would cut $2.5 trillion in spending over 10 years and raise the debt limit by $1.5 trillion, according to two people familiar with the negotiations, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the private conversations.

White House representatives did not respond to requests for comment.

But almost immediately after the House GOP tentatively agreed to that framework, it fell apart, and Johnson put legislation on the floor without a debt limit increase, which finally passed and kept the government open.

Trump appeared to accept that result, but he also declared afterward on his Truth Social site: “The date of the very unnecessary Debt Ceiling will be pushed out two years, to Jan. 30, 2027.”

He has left it up to Republicans in Congress to determine how to turn that request into law, but he’s clearly eager for them to do it.

“He brings it up every time and all the time,” Rep. Kevin Hern (R-Oklahoma) said Tuesday after returning from a White House meeting with Trump.

Still, rank-and-file lawmakers are telling Johnson and other senior GOP leaders that the party probably doesn’t have the votes to raise the debt limit without Democratic help.

One way House GOP leaders think they might get Democrats on board: Combine a debt limit suspension with legislation to fund the government and send aid to California to recover from wildfires. Congress faces a March 15 government shutdown deadline, and the GOP has discussed combining annual funding bills, wildfire aid and the debt limit into one massive parcel.

On Thursday, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-New York) rejected that approach as a “nonstarter.” Now Democrats are putting together wish lists for policies they might trade for their support.

Among the options: undoing some of the flurry of executive orders Trump signed during his first week in office that seek to slash the size and scope of the government, lay off civilian federal workers and enact immigration restrictions.

But some Democrats think the biggest prize would be eliminating the debt limit altogether.

“The days of Democrats just voting to raise the debt ceiling under a Republican president, they need to be over, period,” Rep. Brendan Boyle (Pennsylvania), the top Democrat on the House Budget Committee, told The Post. “We need to make sure that Democratic priorities are met, if we are in any way going to vote to increase the debt ceiling. But at the very least, we need to make sure there’s a permanent resolution to the perennial debt ceiling dysfunction.”

Boyle plans to introduce legislation to authorize the Treasury Department to continue borrowing to pay the nation’s bills even if Congress doesn’t raise the debt limit. He said he’s seeking guarantees to protect funding for social safety net programs — including Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security — along with a permanent debt ceiling abolition before he’d begin negotiating with Republicans on a debt limit suspension.

And Boyle and other Democrats are wary that a debt ceiling increase paired with cuts to safety net programs would make it easier for the GOP to pursue a nearly $5 trillion tax cut. Republicans hope to raise the debt limit and slash some of those accounts to create fiscal space for lowering taxes again.

“I am against these ideas to raise the debt ceiling in order to provide more tax breaks for billionaires. The end,” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) told The Post. “That is my prism and my test for getting into this issue.”

Though getting rid of the debt limit is traditionally a Democratic priority, some argue that doing so now would amount to a big favor to Republicans, who have total control of Washington and therefore would bear total responsibility for a potential default.

Michael Strain, director of economic policy studies at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, said Democrats already have plenty of political clout to fight cuts to Social Security and other popular benefit programs, given the thin Republican majority in the House. He argued that they should leverage their debt ceiling votes to secure more contentious priorities that would improve their standing with voters, such as immigration reform or permanent citizenship status for so-called “dreamers,” the undocumented immigrants who were brought to the United States as children.

“I think trying to trade their votes on suspending the debt ceiling for something like ‘don’t cut Medicaid or don’t cut food stamps,’ that’d be a wasted opportunity,” Strain said. “That would just be kind of fiddling around the edges of these programs when they could do something more meaningful and lasting.”