Bessent Says US Will Never Default as Congress Faces Endgame

By Tony Czuczka

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 Sunday in an interview with CBS’s Face the Nation. “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.

Bessent declined to specify an “X date” — the point at which the Treasury runs out of cash and special accounting measures that allow it to stay within the debt ceiling and still make good on federal obligations on time.

“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.