With just eight weeks to go before the United States breaches the debt ceiling, the speaker of the House is telling the country’s largest financial institutions and investors in the nation’s stock markets that they need to start worrying about President Biden’s no-compromise position. 

“I tried to sit down with the president and the president won’t communicate,” Speaker McCarthy said in an interview with Bloomberg TV. 

Mr. Biden’s position is that the House should pass a bill that raises the debt ceiling without preconditions or changes to the budget. Mr. McCarthy, though, sees this as his opportunity to extract concessions from the White House: “We’re never going to move a bill that just raises the debt ceiling. I’ve been very clear with the president.”

In the last two years, due to the administration’s spending on Covid relief, infrastructure, healthcare, and climate protections, the federal government has added $3 trillion to the national debt. 

Mr. McCarthy warned that the United States is on the brink of being crushed by interest payments on existing debt. “We’re gonna pay — in the next 10 years — $10.5 trillion just in interest. In 80 years, we’ve only spent $9 trillion on interest. We’re about to be at the tipping point,” he said. 

As Democrats point out, the Trump administration added about $8 trillion to the national debt, primarily through tax cuts and emergency spending at the outset of the pandemic. Between the first quarter of 2020 and first quarter of 2021, the debt increased by $5 trillion. Under the Obama administration, the debt nearly doubled, to just under $20 trillion from about $10 trillion. 

Messrs. Biden and McCarthy first met on February 1 to lay the framework for a debt ceiling negotiation. In the succeeding months, the two have traded letters but have had no other meetings. Mr. Biden reiterated his position that Congress should pass a clean increase rather than tie it to other issues like the southern border or welfare reform.

One solution offered by Republicans is to “prioritize” debt payments after the debt ceiling has been breached. Under such a policy, the government would still pay scheduled interest and principal on the national debt, including federal bonds, while spending on other programs would be subordinated based on what remaining funds are available. That could potentially impact spending on programs like Medicare, Social Security, and veterans benefits. 

Secretary Yellen threw cold water on that proposal, telling the House Ways and Means Committee in early March that the plan is just “default by another name.”

“We should not think that prioritization is a solution to the debt ceiling issue,” she told the committee. “Prioritization is simply not paying all of the government’s bills when they come due.”

Whether Mr. McCarthy retains the speakership depends on these negotiations. During the days-long voting process to win the gavel, he made a number of concessions to the conservative House Freedom Caucus and its ideological allies, including allowing for a rule change that permits any individual member to come to the floor and call for a vote of no confidence in the speaker. 

If Mr. McCarthy fails to shore up his right flank and deliver on conservative priorities during these negotiations, he could find himself in another voting marathon, this time to win his job back. 

Some say Mr. Biden’s no-compromise strategy comes from being burned during debt ceiling negotiations in 2011 and 2013. In both of those cases, the United States came harrowingly close to a debt breach because of pressure from recently elected Tea Party representatives.

That standoff was the closest the United States has ever come to defaulting on its debts. At the time, Standard & Poor’s downgraded the country’s credit rating for the first time in history, to AA+ from AAA. In the weeks surrounding the negotiations, the S&P 500 index fell by more than 15 percent and 10-year Treasury yields dropped by more than a third.

According to an estimate from the Department of the Treasury, the debt ceiling will be breached in early June.