John,

The debt ceiling is being exploited by extremists in the House Republican caucus in order to extort cuts to Social Security, health care and other critical programs.

In one of his concessions to win over right-wing Republicans and win the Speaker’s gavel, Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) agreed to hold the debt ceiling increase hostage in order to extract cuts from critical programs. With news that the U.S. will reach our debt ceiling limit tomorrow, the threats to Social Security and Medicare are real.

Failure to increase the debt ceiling would not do anything to limit future spending, it would simply force the United States Treasury to default on its existing bonds.

Tell President Biden: Protect Social Security and Medicare by demanding a clean debt ceiling increase!

Right now, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen will have to resort to “extraordinary measures” in order to continue to pay our country’s bills on time. But, if the debt ceiling isn’t raised by early June, the U.S. Treasury will run out of cash-on-hand causing the U.S. to default on its debts -- something that has never happened before in our history.

Defaulting on our debts means that Social Security payments wouldn’t be made on time, millions of Americans on food assistance would see their benefits suspended, and U.S. military and civilian employees wouldn’t get paid.

Social Security and Medicare are overwhelmingly popular. So while Wall Street has wanted for decades to cut, privatize, or otherwise destroy them, they have never been able to overcome the significant popular backlash to those proposals to cut. That’s why conservatives have hidden behind fast-tracked commissions, committees, and processes like the one Sen. Mitt Romney proposed in his TRUST Act. They want to cut Social Security behind closed doors, without their fingerprints.

President Obama attempted to negotiate in order to raise the debt ceiling in 2011. Those negotiations yielded an agreement that cut funding for critical federal programs, prolonged the Great Recession, led to the downgrading of the United States’s credit rating, and nearly resulted in cuts to Social Security and Medicare. America is a democracy―we should not allow government-by-hostage-crisis to become routine.

President Biden must make it clear: Raising the debt ceiling is the basic minimum that we expect from Congress. There can be no negotiation over a necessity.

Thank you for all you do to protect Social Security and Medicare,

Deborah Weinstein
Executive Director, Coalition on Human Needs