Bessent says U.S. will never default as Congress faces deadline

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the U.S. “is never going to default” as the deadline for increasing the federal debt ceiling gets closer.

“That is never going to happen,” Bessent said in an interview for CBS’ “Face the Nation” scheduled to air Sunday. “We are on the warning track and we will never hit the wall.”

Republican congressional leaders have attached an increase in the debt limit to President Trump’s tax and spending bill, which potentially puts avoiding a default at the mercy of complex negotiations over the legislation. The U.S. Senate returns this week to take up the bill.

Bessent declined to specify an “X date” — the point at which the Treasury runs out of cash and special accounting measures that allow it to stay within the debt ceiling and still make good on federal obligations on time.

“We don’t give out the ‘X date’ because we use that to move the bill forward,” Bessent said. Last month, Bessent told lawmakers that the U.S. was likely to exhaust its borrowing authority by August if the debt ceiling isn’t raised or suspended by then.

Wall Street analysts and private forecasters see the deadline falling sometime between late August and mid-October.

Bessent also pushed back against a warning by JPMorgan Chase & Co. Chief Executive Jamie Dimon that a crack in the bond market “is going to happen.”

“I’ve known Jamie for a long time, and for his entire career he’s made predictions like this,” he said. “Fortunately none of them have come true.”

“We are going to bring the deficit down slowly,” Bessent said. “This has been a long process, so the goal is to bring it down over the next four years.”

Czuczka writes for Bloomberg News.