US to hit debt ceiling Tuesday, starting Congress’ countdown clock
CNN
The nation will hit its roughly $36 trillion debt limit on Tuesday, when the Treasury Department will start taking extraordinary measures to allow the government to pay its bills, outgoing Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said in a letter to congressional leaders on Friday. The notice comes just three days before President-elect Donald Trump takes office.
The nation will hit its roughly $36 trillion debt limit on Tuesday, when the Treasury Department will start taking extraordinary measures to allow the government to pay its bills, outgoing Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said in a letter to congressional leaders on Friday. The notice comes just three days before President-elect Donald Trump takes office. Reaching the cap ramps up pressure on congressional Republicans, but lawmakers have a little time before they must act to avoid a first-ever default, which would likely cause global economic upheaval. The extraordinary measures, which are mainly behind-the-scenes accounting maneuvers, will continue through March 14, Yellen wrote. Although Republicans control Capitol Hill, they remain divided over how to address the debt ceiling. They have several major agenda items they want to push through Congress along party lines, including border security, energy and tax cuts, possibly in one package or two. Plus, lawmakers still must pass a government funding bill for fiscal year 2025, which began October 1. (A temporary spending measure expires on March 14.) A bill to increase or suspend the debt ceiling could be included in one of these packages, though addressing the cap has been a bipartisan effort in recent years. House Speaker Mike Johnson is already running up against resistance from some of his fiscally conservative members, who want to decrease the debt, not increase it. His super-slim majority will make it even more difficult for him to find a compromise — and he may need Democratic support in order to pass an increase to the limit. The issue has already brought to light fissures within the party. In December, Trump demanded that lawmakers address the limit as part of a temporary spending bill. However, the GOP-led package, which included suspending the cap into January 2027, failed amid opposition that included a significant number of Republicans.
There are steps you can take right now to help speed the process of repair and recovery after a devastating weather event, should you ever be directly hit.
Big Oil got its wish: Donald Trump is heading back to the White House, promising to turbocharge American fossil fuels by slashing red tape.
Chinese social media platform Xiaohongshu, also known as RedNote, has been hiring for a surprising position in recent days: English-language content moderators.
China’s economy grew more than expected in the last three months of 2024, official data showed on Friday, as it awaits the likely imposition of fresh tariffs by US President-elect Donald Trump, who takes office next week.
The FDIC sued 17 former executives and directors of Silicon Valley Bank on Thursday, seeking to recover billions of dollars for alleged gross negligence and breaches of fiduciary duty that caused the bank’s March 2023 collapse, one of the largest US banking failures.
Toyota Motor unit Hino Motors has agreed to a $1.6 billion settlement with US agencies and will plead guilty over excess diesel engine emissions in more than 105,000 US vehicles, the company and US government said on Wednesday.
Apple is temporarily pulling its newly introduced artificial intelligence feature that summarizes news notifications after it repeatedly sent users error-filled headlines, sparking backlash from a news organization and press freedom groups.
In its first results since its insurance unit CEO was fatally shot in New York City, UnitedHealth Group reported Thursday weaker-than-expected fourth-quarter revenue, prompting its shares to fall in early morning trading despite quarterly profit beating projections.
When President-elect Donald Trump recently floated the idea of annexing Canada, a key reason he gave was a claim that the United States was “losing $200 billion a year” to its northern neighbor.
Mortgage rates topped 7% this week, a key psychological threshold, in a sign of the US housing market’s unrelenting affordability challenges.
BP is planning to cut more than 5% of its 90,000-strong workforce as part of a cost-cutting drive.
The outgoing Democratic chair of the Federal Communications Commission is taking bold action on the way out the door, rejecting what she described as four efforts to weaponize the government’s TV licensing authority for political purposes.
The Super Bowl has always been free to watch with an antenna, but for the first time, it’s streaming for free too.
Los Angeles was already in a housing crisis before the wildfires consumed large parts of the county: There weren’t enough homes to keep up with demand, making it one of the least affordable real estate markets in the country. Now, the word “crisis” fails to capture the situation on the ground. Thousands of people suddenly need homes. And thousands of homes are suddenly ash.
In the next few months, most Americans will be focused on getting their tax documents together to complete their 2024 returns.
TikTok is still three days away from a likely ban in the United States, but many users are already bidding the app farewell and seeking out alternatives.
President-elect Donald Trump is weighing a plan that could delay America’s TikTok ban, giving the new administration more time to potentially cut a deal with a US buyer to save the super-popular video app, sources familiar with the plans told CNN.
Right-wing media figures call for withholding California wildfire aid, blame ‘liberals’ for disaster
Prominent right-wing media personalities are calling on the federal government to withhold or place conditions on disaster aid for victims of the devastating Los Angeles wildfires, blaming California’s own policies for the scale of the devastation and response.