Trump Renews Calls for Congress to Extend Debt Ceiling Before He Assumes Office

President-elect Donald Trump speaks during Turning Point's annual AmericaFest 2024 in Phoenix, Ariz., on Dec. 22, 2024. Josh Edelson/AFP via Getty Images

President-elect Donald Trump has renewed his calls for the 118th Congress to vote on the debt ceiling before the Biden administration ends on Jan. 20, 2025.

The House on Dec. 20 and the Senate on Dec. 21 avoided addressing the impending debt ceiling limit when passing a stopgap funding package to avert a government shutdown.

In May 2023, President Joe Biden and then-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) raised the debt ceiling and suspended it until Jan. 1, 2025. However, extraordinary measures available to the Treasury Department mean Congress could delay any action to suspend or increase the debt ceiling beyond this deadline by several more months.

“The Democrats must be forced to take a vote on this treacherous issue now, during the Biden Administration, and not in June,” Trump said in a post Sunday night on the Truth Social platform.

“They should be blamed for this potential disaster, not the Republicans!” Trump said.

Trump said that while Republicans would prefer to cut spending and not raise the debt ceiling, Democratic opposition makes this impossible. So, “Congress must get rid of, or extend out to, perhaps, 2029, the ridiculous Debt Ceiling,” Trump previously said.

He has also backed the idea of abolishing the debt ceiling altogether. “The Democrats have said they want to get rid of it. If they want to get rid of it, I would lead the charge,” he said on Dec. 20, winning support for the idea from Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.).

Ahead of the vote on the funding package, Trump called for elected representatives to vote against any funding deal that didn’t address the impending debt ceiling decision—a bid to avoid giving the Democrats any negotiating leverage in the next Congress.

The initial 1,547-page bill failed following a social media firestorm that saw strong opposition from incoming Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) co-chairs Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, and then Trump and Vice President-elect JD Vance. Trump said at the time that the bill included passing unacceptable “Democrat giveaways” alongside necessary government funding for up to March 14, 2025.

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) then presented a scaled-down 116-page funding bill to the House for a vote on Dec. 19, which the chamber overwhelmingly rejected amid opposition by House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.). Included in the bill was a suspension of the debt ceiling until January 2027 as well as new spending items.

Following further deliberations, from which Johnson said the Republican conference was unified against a government shutdown, Johnson then presented a 118-page bill that left the issue of the debt ceiling for 2025. That funding bill passed and was signed into law. It included $110 billion in emergency hurricane relief and $30 billion in farm aid, extended the farm bill for one year, and a series of other minor provisions.

“The extension of the Debt Ceiling by a previous Speaker of the House, a good man and a friend of mine, from this past September of the Biden Administration, to June of the Trump Administration, will go down as one of the dumbest political decisions made in years,” Trump said.

“There was no reason to do it—nothing was gained, and we got nothing for it—A major reason why that Speakership was lost. It was Biden’s problem, not ours. Now it becomes ours.”