The Debt-Ceiling Crisis Is Real<br />Finally, some conservative policy makers besides Mr. Mulvaney have convinced themselves<br />that crashing into the debt ceiling won’t be a big deal because the government can “prioritize” its bill payments, so that interest on Treasury debt will be paid on a current basis, while other bills sit unpaid.<br />Crashing into the debt ceiling, by contrast, would occur if Treasury had no money in its bank account<br />because Congress prohibited it from funding deficits through incremental borrowing.<br />Sometime in October, the United States is likely to default on its obligation to<br />pay its bills as they come due, having failed to raise the federal debt ceiling.<br />But that puts him in tension with his White House colleague Mick Mulvaney, the director of the Office of Management and Budget and a founding member of the Freedom Caucus, who has intimated<br />that breaching the debt ceiling would not be that consequential, and who has argued that the must-pass legislation should be used to advance the hard right’s agenda.<br />Without a firm signal from the White House that the debt ceiling should not be held hostage<br />to political agendas, it will be hard to get Congress to do the right thing.<br />The debt ceiling is politically imposed, and the decision not to raise it, and therefore to choose to default, is also political.<br />Hitting the debt ceiling is not the same as a government shutdown or other fiscal brinkmanship.<br />Treasury can pay the government’s bills on a first-in, first-out basis, with the wait for payment growing<br />every month, or it can prioritize bills, as Mr. Mulvaney and others have suggested it would.
