Treasury Secretary Mnuchin says tie Harvey relief funds to raising the debt ceiling

published 3 September 2017

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin told host Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday the Trump administration wants Congress to raise the debt ceiling without cutting spending, and that the raise should be tied to funding Hurricane Harvey recovery measures.

"The White House is asking Congress for $7.8 billion in immediate aid, plus another $6.7 billion" in the next few weeks, Wallace noted, and the head of the "House Freedom Caucus, Mark Meadows, says he does not want to see that disaster aid tied to a bill to raise the debt limit. Can you guarantee him and others that that won't happen?"

"No, I can't," Mnuchin replied. "Quite the contrary. The president and I believe that it should be tied to the Harvey funding. Our first priority is to make sure that the state gets money. It is critical. And to do that, we need to make sure we raise the debt limit. If Congress appropriates the money, but I don't have the ability to borrow more money and pay for it, we're not going to be able to get that money to the state."

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.

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