Opinion | How Trump Could Get Us Into a Debt Crisis

You’ve heard warnings for years about how a fiscal crisis was brewing in the United States because the debt is unsustainable — and financial markets would eventually protest. However, the logic was often vague and the risk hypothetical.
Guess what? The Trump administration has made obvious the real source of risk. It isn’t federal borrowing grinding ever higher. The true risk is our political leaders doing something wildly irresponsible that unnerves financial markets.
President Trump has brought budgetary chaos with extraordinary speed. In just his first week in office, his administration threatened to withhold payments of trillions of dollars of congressionally enacted spending. Days later, he appeared to reverse course. Then he allowed staff members of the newly formed Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, to gain access to critical Treasury payment systems, prompting the resignation of a senior official with decades of public service. New threats to withhold federal payments now come daily. At least one agency, the U.S. Agency for International Development, may no longer be operative.
Those who have spent years scanning the horizon for risks of a fiscal crisis should fix their sights on the president’s malpractice. When Mr. Trump asserts he can pick and choose which payments to make, regardless of laws enacted by Congress, it is not impossible to imagine the president declaring he can pick and choose which holders of United States Treasury securities should be paid.