Treasury secretary Scott Bessent insists US will ‘never default’ on its debt

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Treasury secretary Scott Bessent has insisted the US would never default on its debt as he sought to assuage Wall Street concerns over the state of the country’s public finances. 

“The United States of America is never going to default, that is never going to happen,” Bessent told CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday. “We are on the warning track and we will never hit the wall.”

Investor jitters over the size of the US federal debt have mounted as President Donald Trump has urged Congress to push through his “big beautiful” budget bill, which is expected to ratchet up the federal deficit.

Bessent dismissed concerns raised by JPMorgan Chase chief executive Jamie Dimon on Friday that the US bond market would “crack” under the weight of the country’s rising debt.

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

The Congressional Budget Office, the government’s fiscal watchdog, warned in March that, even without the new budget legislation, US debt as a share of GDP would exceed its 1940s peak in the coming years. Last month, rating agency Moody’s stripped the US of its triple A debt rating.

The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget has warned that, as written, Trump’s bill would add about $3tn in debt over the next decade.

Investors are also worried that the issue of raising the debt ceiling — which would increase by $4tn under the proposed legislation — is now beholden to Congressional wrangling and Republican party infighting.

The bill passed the House of Representatives last month and is set to be debated by the Senate. But some members of the upper chamber have expressed unease over both the high spending levels and the scale of the increase to the debt limit.

Elon Musk, who this week stepped down from his role in the Trump administration, said in a CBS interview aired on Sunday that he was “disappointed” with the “massive spending bill”, which he said undermined the cost-cutting work of his so-called Department of Government Efficiency.

The Trump administration has insisted the bill will not increase the deficit and that projections fail to take into account increases in economic growth.

“I am telling you this is going to reduce the deficit,” Mike Johnson, Speaker of the House of Representatives, told NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday. “We are going to spur on tremendous economic growth here.”

Bessent said that many projections had also not accounted for the “substantial” income boost from Trump’s sweeping new import tariffs, which could add trillions of dollars to government revenues.

“The deficit this year is going to be lower than the deficit last year and in two years, it will be lower again,” said Bessent.

Trump’s tariff plans hit a hurdle last week after a court ruled the president did not have the authority he relied on to impose most of the levies. The White House won a temporary stay against the order.

Commerce secretary Howard Lutnick said that even if the president was blocked from imposing tariffs under certain powers, he would find other avenues to do so.

“Rest assured, tariffs are not going away,” Lutnick told Fox News Sunday.

“He has so many other authorities that even in the weird and unusual circumstance where this was taken away, we just bring on another or another or another.”