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U.S. lawmakers are examining the details of an agreement to increase the country’s borrowing limit ahead of votes expected in the coming days, as both President Joe Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy urge them to approve it. 

The proposal includes waiving the debt ceiling until January 2025 and a two-year budget deal that keeps federal spending flat in 2024 and increases it by 1% in 2025. 

Among the other pieces of the compromise package are reducing some funding to hire new Internal Revenue Service agents, rescinding $30 billion in COVID-19 relief and ensuring people ages 49 to 54 meet work requirements in order to receive food aid. 

Biden and McCarthy reached the agreement Sunday after weeks of negotiations with an early June deadline looming for the government running out of money to pay its bills. 

“The agreement prevents the worst possible crisis, a default, for the first time in our nation’s history,” Biden said at the White House. It “takes the threat of a catastrophic default off the table.”  

McCarthy, discussing the agreement at the Capitol, said, “At the end of the day, people can look together to be able to pass this.”  

SEE ALSO: A related video by VOA’s Veronica Balderas Iglesias

While the two leaders expressed support for the deal, progressive Democratic lawmakers from the party’s ideological left, and Republicans from the party’s right-wing immediately voiced opposition Sunday.      

“The agreement represents a compromise, which means not everyone gets what they want. But that’s the responsibility of governing,” Biden said in a statement. He called the pact “an important step forward that reduces spending while protecting critical programs for working people and growing the economy for everyone.”      

Earlier Sunday, McCarthy, on the “Fox News Sunday” show, said that from Republicans’ perspective, “There’s so much in this that is positive. It will not do everything for everyone, but this is a step in the right direction.”       

The debt ceiling needs to be increased so the government can borrow more money, or the U.S. government will run out of cash to pay its existing bills June 5, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has warned Congress.     

Yellen has said that without an increase in the debt ceiling or a suspension of the borrowing limit, interest on U.S. bonds held by foreign governments and individual American investors would be imperiled, as well as stipends for U.S. pensioners and salaries for government workers and contractors. Without enough tax receipts coming into U.S. coffers to pay its bills, the government would be forced to prioritize which payments to make.    

Another part of the agreement would also speed up the approval process for new energy projects.     

The pact also left in place Biden’s plan to write off up to $20,000 in student loan debts but says that loan recipients will have to start making loan payments that had been paused during the coronavirus pandemic. The provision would become moot if the Supreme Court overturns Biden’s authority to revoke the debt in a challenge to his action that it is expected to rule on by the end of June.    

Democratic Representative Pramila Jayapal, the leader of the 102-member House progressive caucus, told CNN’s “State of the Union” show that Biden and Jeffries should worry about progressives’ support for passage of the debt ceiling increase.     

Jayapal criticized expanding work requirements for food stamp recipients and said she did not know whether she would vote for the debt ceiling increase.    

“I’m not a big fan of in-principle (agreements) frameworks,” she told CNN’s “State of the Union” show. “That’s always, you know, a problem if you can’t see the exact legislative text. And we’re all trying to wade through spin right now. But I think it’s going to come down to what the legislative text is.”   

Among Republicans, Representative Bob Good wrote on Twitter, “No one claiming to be a conservative could justify a YES vote” on the package.    

Another Republican critic of the deal, Representative Ralph Norman, tweeted, “This ‘deal’ is insanity.” He said a possible $4 trillion increase in the debt over the next two years “with virtually no cuts is not what we agreed to. Not gonna vote to bankrupt our country. The American people deserve better.” 

Some information for this story came from The Associated Press, Agence France-Presse and Reuters. 
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Republican and Democratic House leaders expressed optimism Sunday that they will get enough votes in favor of raising the debt ceiling. VOA’s Veronica Balderas Iglesias has details on a deal that has in principle, been struck. Video editor: Marcus Harton.
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 China’s first domestically made passenger jet flew its maiden commercial flight Sunday, as China looks to compete with industry giants such as Boeing and Airbus in the global aircraft market.

The C919 plane, built by the Commercial Aviation Corporation of China, carried about 130 passengers on the flight, according to state-owned newspaper China Daily. The jet took off Sunday morning from Shanghai Hongqiao Airport and landed less than two hours later in Beijing.

The flight was operated by state-owned China Eastern Airlines and the side of the plane was emblazoned with the words: “The World’s First C919.”

The inaugural flight comes as COMAC looks to break into the single-aisle jet market in a direct challenge to Airbus and Boeing. Airbus’s A320 and Boeing’s B737 jets are the most popular aircraft, typically used for domestic and regional flights.

While COMAC designed many of the C919’s parts, some of its key components are still sourced from the West, including its engine.

The company plans to build 150 C919 planes each year for the next five years, according to earlier state media reports.

The C919, in development for 16 years, has a maximum range of about 3,500 miles (5,630 kilometers) and is designed to carry between 158 and 168 passengers.

Over 1,200 C919 jetliners have been ordered, COMAC says, with China Eastern Airlines under contract to buy five of them.
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Good relations with China are possible even without being part of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) deal, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said in an interview published Sunday, as her government weighs abandoning the project.

Italy is the only major Western country to have joined China’s BRI scheme, which envisions rebuilding the old Silk Road to connect China with Asia, Europe and beyond with large infrastructure spending.

In an interview with Il Messaggero daily, Meloni said it was too early to anticipate the outcome of Italy’s decision on whether to remain part of the project, which it signed up for in 2019, drawing criticism from Washington and Brussels.

“Our assessment is very delicate and touches upon many interests,” said Meloni. The pact expires in March 2024 and will be automatically renewed unless either side informs the other that they are pulling out, giving at least three months’ notice.

In an interview with Reuters last year, before she won power in a September election, Meloni made clear she disapproved of the 2019 move, saying she had “no political will … to favor Chinese expansion into Italy or Europe.”

Meloni noted that while Italy was the only one of the Group of Seven (G7) rich democracies to have signed the Belt and Road memorandum, it was not the European and Western country with the strongest economic and trade ties with China.

“This means it is possible to have good relations, also in important areas, with Beijing, without necessarily these being part of an overall strategic design,” she said.

Earlier this month a senior Italian government official told Reuters Italy was highly unlikely to renew the Belt and Road deal.

A first test of the right-wing government’s attitude toward China looms as Rome vets a shareholder pact at tire maker Pirelli’s, whose top investor is China’s Sinochem.

China is among the biggest markets for most countries in the G7 group, particularly for export-reliant economies such as Japan and Germany.

At a summit last weekend, G7 leaders pledged to “de-risk” without “decoupling” from China, an approach that reflected European and Japanese concerns about pushing Beijing too hard, officials and experts said.
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The United States “won’t tolerate” China’s effective ban on purchases of Micron Technology MU.O memory chips and is working closely with allies to address such “economic coercion,” U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said Saturday.

Raimondo told a news conference after a meeting of trade ministers in the U.S.-led Indo-Pacific Economic Framework talks that the U.S. “firmly opposes” China’s actions against Micron.

These “target a single U.S. company without any basis in fact, and we see it as plain and simple economic coercion and we won’t tolerate it, nor do we think it will be successful.”

China’s cyberspace regulator said May 21 that Micron, the biggest U.S. memory chip maker, had failed its network security review and that it would block operators of key infrastructure from buying from the company, prompting it to predict a revenue reduction.

The move came a day after leaders of the G7 industrial democracies agreed to new initiatives to push back against economic coercion by China — a decision noted by Raimondo.

“As we said at the G7 and as we have said consistently, we are closely engaging with partners addressing this specific challenge and all challenges related to China’s non-market practices.”

Raimondo also raised the Micron issue in a meeting Thursday with China’s Commerce Minister, Wang Wentao.

She also said the IPEF agreement on supply chains and other pillars of the talks would be consistent with U.S. investments in the $52 billion CHIPS Act to foster semiconductor production in the United States.

“The investments in the CHIPS Act are to strengthen and bolster our domestic production of semiconductors. Having said that, we welcome participation from companies that are in IPEF countries, you know, so we expect that companies from Japan, Korea, Singapore, etc, will participate in the CHIPS Act funding,” Raimondo said.
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