US projected to default this summer absent congressional action
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(WASHINGTON) — The Congressional Budget Office warned on Wednesday that the government could run out of money to pay its bills as early as August or September if lawmakers fail to address the debt limit.
“The government’s ability to borrow using extraordinary measures will probably be exhausted in August or September 2025,” the nonpartisan CBO report predicted.
The CBO added that a precise projected X date is unclear because “the timing and amount of revenue collections and outlays over the intervening months could differ from the CBO’s projections.” The estimated projection provides Congress with a rough timeline to deal with the debt limit to avoid a default.
“If the government’s borrowing needs are significantly greater than CBO projects, the Treasury’s resources could be exhausted in late May or sometime in June, before tax payments due in mid-June are received or before additional extraordinary measures become available on June 30,” it said in the report.
If lawmakers do not raise or suspend the debt limit before all extraordinary measures are exhausted, the government could default on its debt — something that’s only happened a handful of times in U.S. history, though never in regard to the statutory debt limit.
“The Treasury has already reached the current debt limit of $36.1 trillion, so it has no room to borrow under its standard operating procedures,” according to the CBO report.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told congressional leaders that his department would provide an estimate of how long extraordinary measures will last during the first half of May — following tax season.
“I respectfully urge Congress to act promptly to protect the full faith and credit of the United States,” Bessent wrote in a March 14 letter to Congress.
The issue has been on Congress’ to-do list since last winter, when then-Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen warned the debt limit would be met around President Donald Trump’s inauguration, which was on Jan. 20.
While Trump has called on House and Senate Republicans to abolish the debt limit, members of Congress are expected to include a provision in their budget reconciliation package to suspend the debt limit through the end of the Trump administration, though a plan is not finalized, including whether to offset any increase with spending cuts and reform.
(WASHINGTON) — President Donald Trump said he is confident in his national security adviser, Mike Waltz — a day after a report detailed how he inadvertently added a journalist to a Signal group chat discussing Yemen war plans.
Trump told NBC News on Tuesday that Waltz “has learned a lesson and is a good man.”
The president brushed off concerns about the group chat on the messaging app, which reportedly included operational details about war plans in Yemen — and mistakenly included The Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg, according to a report from Goldberg published Monday.
Trump told NBC News that Goldberg’s presence in the chat had “no impact at all” and called the whole ordeal “the only glitch” his administration has faced since Inauguration Day.
Goldberg said he received a Signal invitation from Waltz, who was a member of the group chat. Goldberg said the group chat also appeared to include Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, among others.
White House National Security Council spokesman Brian Hughes told ABC News on Monday that the group chat “appears to be authentic.”
Trump tapped Waltz, a former Florida congressman, to be his national security adviser in November, calling him “a nationally recognized leader in national security” and an “expert on the threats posed by China, Russia, Iran, and global terrorism.”
Waltz is a China hawk and was the first Green Beret elected to Congress. During the presidential campaign, Waltz proved to be a key surrogate for Trump, criticizing the Biden-Harris foreign policy record.
Elected to the House in 2018, Waltz sat on the Intelligence, Armed Services and Foreign Affairs committees. He also serves on the House China Task Force with 13 other Republicans.
Before running for elected office, Waltz served in various national security policy roles in the George W. Bush administration in the Pentagon and White House. He retired as a colonel after serving 27 years in the Army and the National Guard.
ABC News’ Rachel Scott, Benjamin Siegel, Katherine Faulders and John Santucci contributed to this report.
(WASHINGTON) — As President Donald Trump works at a breakneck speed to implement his second-term agenda , including wholesale firings and sweeping policy changes, he and his advisers assert his power over the executive branch is complete and can’t be questioned.
Still, his flurry of executive actions and orders spark a critical question: Does he have the power he claims to have?
Multiple court challenges are underway trying to stop his attempts to end birthright citizenship and temporarily freeze federal loans and grants.
More legal pushback will unfold amid Trump’s unprecedented purge of the executive workforce and reshaping of what Congress set up as independent agencies, the dismantling of which is largely being carried out by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.
Trump quickly fired 17 independent watchdogs and the director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Longtime Democratic Federal Election Commissioner Ellen Weintraub said Trump sent a letter removing her from the commission. His administration has directed all federal DEI staff be put on leave. The Justice Department fired more than a dozen of prosecutors who worked on Jan. 6 cases. Millions of employees were offered buyouts, with tens of thousands of people accepting them.
His administration has touted the moves as long-overdue cutting of waste in favor of a merit-based system. His critics slam them as a radical restructuring of the federal government aimed at consolidating presidential power — and placing loyalty to Trump over regulatory agency expertise designed to be insulated from political influence.
The ‘unitary executive theory’
Driving Trump’s strategy is a legal framework championed by conservatives, perhaps most notably by Trump’s newly-confirmed director of White House Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, an architect of Project 2025. (Democrats held an all-night protest of Vought’s nomination on the Senate floor Wednesday into Thursday, though his nomination was later approved by Republicans.)
The so-called “unitary executive theory” has various iterations but centers on the idea that the Constitution gives the president sole control over the executive branch of government.
Its advocates point to Article II, which reads in part: “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.”
“I think that means he has the power to control subordinates throughout the executive branch, including in the independent agencies and how they exercise power. And as a corollary to that, he has the power to remove or fire subordinates in the executive branch,” said Steven Calabresi, a Northwestern University law professor and former Reagan administration official who co-authored a book on the unitary executive theory.
Trump in 2019 said: “I have an Article II, where I have the right to do whatever I want as president.”
Setting up Supreme Court test cases?
Some of Trump’s firings, especially those that seem to fly in the face of statutory protections for civil service workers from being removed without cause, are likely to result in lawsuits that put that theory in front of the courts.
“I think they are setting up test cases, and this Supreme Court is very likely to expand the theory and overrule other cases that are in tension with it,” said David Driesen, a law professor at Syracuse University.
In 2020, the Supreme Court found a provision from Congress limiting the president’s authority to remove the director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau violated the Constitution — a departure from precedent. The Trump White House has pointed to that ruling as justification for some of its firings.
Trump pushing limits on executive authority
But some say Trump is leaning on the theory to go even further, blatantly trying to take over powers the Constitution gives to other branches of government, namely Congress, violating the separation of powers and the concept of checks and balances.
“This is where the debate is: at what point does the kind of power that Trump wants and the way he exercises his power cross over from a constitutional vision about presidential power to an a-constitutional vision,” said Bob Bauer, a law professor at New York University and former White House counsel under President Barack Obama.
“The unitary executive theory has a history that isn’t nearly, in my judgment, what is claimed for it and now put into effect by Trump and his allies,” Bauer added.
Trump has sought to sidestep Congress and take control of federal spending, trying to freeze money already appropriated by lawmakers. His OMB pick, Vought, told senators during his confirmation hearing that the Trump administration would seek to impound funds it believes are being misspent.
Even bolder, Trump’s pledging to dismantle entire agencies. Turmoil is roiling USAID as its being taken over by the State Department and its staff reduced from 14,000 people to fewer than 300 staff, sources said. Trump is expected to move soon on his proposal to cripple the Department of Education just short of eliminating it.
Many of this will play out in the courts in the months ahead. But experts said, in the meantime, harm will be immediate and possibly felt for years to come.
“He’s going to do an enormous amount of damage that the courts can’t in all cases readily remediate,” Bauer said. “By the time he’s finished emptying out some of these agencies and in some cases closing them, putting all that back together again is going to be very challenging.”
“It will take years to rebuild some of these institutions. So, Trump and his team will accomplish much of what they want before the courts can fully and effectively respond. He will have created new facts on the ground.”
(WASHINGTON) — President Donald Trump is set to visit the Justice Department on Friday — a move that comes as he has sought to assert control over the nation’s top law-enforcement agency that brought two historic prosecutions against him, which were thwarted by his 2024 election victory.
The rare visit will mark Trump’s first time inside the walls of the Robert F. Kennedy building as president, and follows nearly a decade’s worth of conflict that have proven to be the ultimate stress test for the Justice Department’s post-Watergate norms intended to preserve independence from the White House.
The opening weeks of Trump’s presidency have been a time of unprecedented upheaval for the DOJ, as Trump’s political leadership immediately moved to reassign or oust career officials who served in senior criminal and national security roles across multiple administrations.
Dozens of prosecutors who worked on investigations stemming from the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol were fired, as well as DOJ and FBI officials who worked on former Special Counsel Jack Smith’s investigations of Trump.
An effort by the department to drop its criminal corruption case against New York Mayor Adams resulted in a dramatic standoff leading to multiple resignations by prosecutors and other top officials who described the arrangement as a clear “quid pro quo” to secure Adams’ cooperation with the administration’s aggressive immigration enforcement efforts.
In remarks Thursday to reporters at the White House, Trump said his speech at DOJ would “set out” his “vision” for the department through the rest of his tenure.
“I think we have unbelievable people, and all I’m going to do is set out my vision. It’s going to be their vision, really, but it’s my ideas,” he said. “We want to have justice, and we want to have — we want to have safety in our cities as well as our communities. And we’ll be talking about immigration. We’ll be talking about a lot of things.”
Nearly every top appointee for the department previously represented Trump as a defense attorney in either an official or personal capacity, a reflection of Trump’s expectation for loyalty from a department that he has said he believes stymied his first term and was later “weaponized” against him after leaving office.
While Attorney General Pam Bondi told senators in her confirmation hearing she would “not politicize” her office, her opening weeks, critics argue, have been marked with politically-charged statements repeatedly emphasizing her loyalty to Trump.
“I’ve never seen this before, and we all adore Donald Trump and we want to protect him and fight for his agenda,” Bondi said in an interview with Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump.
In another interview early this month, Bondi said she was still working to “root out” officials at the department who she said “despise Donald Trump.”
In one of her first directives following her confirmation, Bondi ordered DOJ officials to “zealously defend” the interests of the presidency, and threatened discipline or termination for any attorney who refused to sign onto legal arguments put forward by political leadership.
“When Department of Justice attorneys, for example, refuse to advance good-faith arguments by declining to appear in court or sign briefs, it undermines the constitutional order and deprives the President of the benefit of his lawyers,” the directive stated.
Trump’s visit to DOJ is his first to any government agency since taking office, though it’s not without precedent. The last visit by a sitting American president to the building was by former President Barack Obama, who attended a departure ceremony in 2015 for Eric Holder — for a retirement ceremony honoring his time as attorney general.
