Last month, the Democratic president signed a bipartisan deal
after excruciating negotiations with Republican House Speaker
Kevin McCarthy that narrowly averted a crisis that threatened to
send the United States into an unprecedented default and
economic crisis.
A new group led by White House counsel Stuart Delery and
National Economic Council Lael Brainard will examine, among
other potential changes, actions Congress could take to make
default risk "a thing of the past," according to the statement.
It was not immediately clear whether the panel, which includes
no prominent Republican officials, would endorse doing away with
the debt ceiling altogether or a novel legal theory Biden has
toyed with that he may be able to ignore the statutory limits
under 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
The Working Group would "examine potential actions that Congress
could take to make the risk of default a thing of the past as
well as Constitution-based and other approaches to avoiding a
future crisis absent congressional action," the White House said
in a statement.
The group includes Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, Attorney
General Merrick Garland, White House budget director Shalanda
Young and Council of Economic Advisers chair Jared Bernstein.
That group will consult with four legal scholars, including
Professor Emeritus Laurence Tribe of Harvard Law School, and
Morgan Stanley global chief economist Seth Carpenter, among
others, at their first session, the White House said.
This year's bipartisan debt ceiling deal keeps fiscal 2024
spending flat at this year's levels, allowing a 1% increase for
fiscal 2025. The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office
estimates that the deal will cut deficits by about $1.5 trillion
over a decade from its current-law baseline forecast.
The deal was approved by 149 House Republicans - a strong party
majority - along with 165 Democrats. Forty-six Democrats, mostly
progressives, spoke out against the deal, saying it enforced
stringent work requirements on poor families who receive food
assistance or monetary aid and others who face obstacles to
employment.
(Reporting by Trevor Hunnicutt; Editing by Leslie Adler and
Stephen Coates)
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