Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), who’s running in the 2024 presidential race, blasted the bipartisan debt ceiling deal struck in principle over the weekend, arguing the U.S. is still “careening toward bankruptcy.”
“Prior to this deal … our country was careening towards bankruptcy. And after this deal, our country will still be careening towards bankruptcy,” DeSantis said on “Fox & Friends.”
“To say you can do 4 trillion [dollars] of increases in the next year-and-a-half, I mean, that’s a massive amount of spending. I think that we’ve gotten ourselves on a trajectory here — really since March of 2020, with some of the COVID spending, and totally reset the budget, and they’re sticking with that. And I think that that’s just going to be totally inadequate to get us in a better spot,” the governor said.
After months of tensions and negotiations, President Biden and Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) on Saturday said they’d reached a deal in principle to raise the debt ceiling for two years and add new spending caps in that same period.
The tentative agreement, which now goes before the House and Senate, has taken heat from both sides of the aisle. The nation is just days away from the June 5 deadline, after which Treasury Department Secretary Janet Yellen has warned the U.S. will run out of money to pay its bills and stave off default.
The Florida governor argued Monday that “in Washington, D.C., they do these cycles to just get them through the next election. And that’s ultimately one of the reasons why they continue to fail,” DeSantis said.
DeSantis launched a 2024 presidential bid last week, joining former President Trump and a growing field of other high-profile Republicans in the party’s primary race. Biden is running for reelection.