President Biden will cut short an upcoming foreign trip, skipping planned stops in Papua New Guinea and Australia amid increasingly urgent talks between the White House and Congress over how to raise the government’s debt limit and avoid a potentially catastrophic default, The Washington Post reports.
Biden will still leave Wednesday to attend a Group of Seven summit in Hiroshima, Japan, but will return to the United States on Sunday. He had initially planned to follow up the event in Japan with a stop in Papua New Guinea, the first by an American president, and a stay in Australia to talk about countering China’s influence.
The “Quad Leaders’ Summit” — comprising the leaders of the United States, Australia, India and Japan — which was scheduled to be held in Sydney next week has now been canceled.
Earlier on Tuesday, White House officials had suggested that Biden might cut the trip short because of the ongoing negotiations. The president has been talking with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and other congressional leaders as they look to avoid a default before June 1, when officials estimate the government will no longer be able to pay its bills if the debt ceiling is not raised.
“We are reevaluating the rest of the trip right now,” John Kirby, a spokesman for the National Security Council, told reporters Tuesday afternoon just before Biden met with congressional leaders in the Oval Office.
A short time later, the decision became official, according to a senior administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss plans that had not yet been made public.
