House Panel OKs Stopgap Increase in Debt Limit

WASHINGTON —  The House Ways and Means Committee approved on Tuesday an emergency one-week increase in the national debt limit, as a snarl in the Senate over budget reforms continued to block long-term debt legislation.

The committee, by voice vote, approved a bill to increase the debt limit to $2.32 trillion through Aug. 6. The full House was expected to consider the bill today, with Senate action possible later today.

The Treasury has been without borrowing authority since July 18, when an earlier, temporary debt limit of $2.32 trillion expired and the national debt ceiling fell to $2.111 trillion, the so-called permanent level.

The government already owes more than the lower level, and unless new credit is approved before Friday, the Treasury could default for the first time in U.S. history.

The House last month approved a new permanent debt ceiling of $2.565 trillion, enough to last through September, 1988. However, the legislation has stalled in the Senate.

Senate Democrats and Republicans have been bickering over an amendment to the long-term debt bill that would restore automatic spending cuts as the enforcement mechanism for the Gramm-Rudman budget-balancing law. The lawmakers have been unable to agree on just how that should be done.

The Senate last week rebuffed alternative plans offered by Sen. Lawton Chiles (D-Fla.), chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, and Sen. Pete V. Domenici of New Mexico, the committee’s senior Republican. The two were leading closed-door negotiations Tuesday aimed at reaching a compromise.

Gramm-Rudman contained an automatic spending-cut scheme in its original 1985 form, but it was thrown out by the Supreme Court last year. Neither Congress nor the White House has complied with Gramm-Rudman’s deficit-reduction schedule, and each has blamed the other.

The short-term debt bill approved by the House committee Tuesday would allow the Treasury to resume sales of U.S. savings bonds.