The GOP raised the debt limit without cutting spending

The United States has reached its debt ceiling and is potentially just weeks away from default debt.

The Treasury Department is running out of money to pay bills that Congress has already authorized and needs to borrow more, but it can’t do that until Congress raises the debt ceiling.

Republicans in Congress, who hold the majority in the House of Representatives, say they will not vote to raise the debt ceiling unless the bill also includes significant spending cuts, a proposal President Biden has rejected.

VERIFY viewer Andy heard that Republicans raised the debt ceiling several times with no strings attached when Donald Trump was president, and wanted to know if that was true.

Did congressional Republicans vote to lift the debt ceiling without spending cuts during the Trump administration?

So, during the Trump administration, Republicans in Congress voted several times to lift the debt ceiling without cutting spending.

The debt limit has been lifted 78 times since 1960 — 49 times under a Republican president and 29 times under a Democrat — according to Treasury Department.

Three of those cases were during the Trump administration. U 2017 year, 2018 yearand 2019 year Congress approved measures to raise the ceiling shortly before it was reached.

All three times, Congress failed to vote to raise the cap by a certain amount, as they did usually do, and the way they did not too long ago 2021 year when Biden was in office. Instead, they voted yes to suspend limit as a whole, allowing the Treasury to borrow the necessary funds at will.

Then, when the suspension ended, a new ceiling was automatically set based on how much the Treasury borrowed during that time.

As a result of Art the debt ceiling has risen by several trillion dollars during Trump’s administration.

None of the suspension bills is included the kind of cuts in federal spending that Republicans are now calling for. A waste in fact increased by approximately $3 trillion during Trump’s tenure, thanks in large part to the federal government’s response to the pandemic.

Some of the bills included “reimbursements,” but budget analysis groups such as the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget marked these are mostly as “budget gimmicks” that have had no real impact on spending.

Democrats have sometimes voted against raising the debt ceiling when a Republican was president. Biden himself, serving in the Senate, opposed an increase in 2003, when George W. Bush was in office. However, Democrats did not control the House of Representatives or the Senate at the time, and did not use the filibuster to prevent the increase from passing as it did.

Since 2000, Democrats have held either the House of Representatives or the Senate under a Republican president three times: 2000-2002, 2006-2008, and 2018-2020.

Between 2000 and 2002 there were the debt limit does not increase needed.

Between 2006 and 2008, there was only one vote to raise the debt ceiling. It passed with members of both parties voting for and against.

Between 2018 and 2020, the aforementioned 2018 and 2019 debt limit bills passed with bipartisan support.