WASHINGTON (AP) - White House budget director Mick Mulvaney warned lawmakers on Wednesday that they may have to vote to increase the government's borrowing authority sooner than previously thought.
Mulvaney told the House Budget Committee that "receipts currently are coming a little bit slower than expected." He said lawmakers should expect Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin to inform them of "a change in the date" in which Congress will need to act to increase the debt limit to avert an economy-rattling default on U.S. obligations like bond payments.
Mnuchin was testifying on Capitol Hill Wednesday afternoon.
Mnuchin said in a letter to lawmakers in March that that he has started employing bookkeeping measures to avoid breaching the debt limit.
Those maneuvers, set out in law, are deemed "extraordinary measures," but in reality they have been employed numerous times by Mnuchin's predecessors to buy time until Congress could pass the legislation needed to raise the borrowing limit.
The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that the bookkeeping maneuvers Mnuchin can use will be exhausted by sometime in the fall.
But a key Capitol Hill aide, requiring anonymity because the aide wasn't authorized to discuss the information publicly, said the Trump administration has urged GOP leaders to act before Congress recesses for its annual August vacation.
Mnuchin has urged lawmakers to move quickly to remove investor doubt about any potential default. Lawmakers had been expected to wait until September or later to act.