WASHINGTON, Nov. 16 (Xinhua) -- U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen on Tuesday urged Congress to raise the federal government's debt limit by Dec. 15 to avoid a potential default.
In a letter to U.S. congressional leaders, Yellen said that the U.S. Treasury Department must transfer 118 billion U.S. dollars to the Highway Trust Fund by Dec. 15 to comply with the bipartisan infrastructure bill signed by President Joe Biden on Monday.
"While I have a high degree of confidence that Treasury will be able to finance the U.S. government through December 15 and complete the Highway Trust Fund investment, there are scenarios in which Treasury would be left with insufficient remaining resources to continue to finance the operations of the U.S. government beyond this date," Yellen said.
"To ensure the full faith and credit of the United States, it is critical that Congress raise or suspend the debt limit as soon as possible," she added.
Congress last month passed a short-term bill to raise the federal government's debt limit by 480 billion dollars, allowing the Treasury Department to meet obligations through Dec. 3.
The Treasury Department had reached its new borrowing limit of 28.9 trillion dollars in late October, and is once again financing the federal government through "extraordinary measures" to prevent a default, according to the Bipartisan Policy Center, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank.
Unless Congress passes a new bill to raise or suspend the debt limit, the federal government is most likely to default on its debt between mid-December and mid-February next year, the center projected.
The debt limit, commonly called the debt ceiling, is the total amount of money that the U.S. government is authorized to borrow to meet its existing legal obligations, including social security and medicare benefits, interest on the national debt, and other payments. Enditem
