OMB director: It's never good to scare the world economy

Office of Management and Budget director Shalanda Young declined to say Sunday whether she’s worried about the threat of a U.S. credit downgrade, but said bringing the U.S. to the brink of default was “bad for the country.”

“Brinksmanship is bad. And while we don't control the Fitch process, this is exactly why we talked about this for months, that we should not have this brinksmanship around something Congress has done 100 times in its history,” Young said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

Though Congress was able to reach a deal to raise the debt limit ahead of the June 5 “X-date,” Fitch Ratings, the international credit rating agency, said that “repeated political standoffs” over the federal government’s borrowing limit “lowers confidence in governance on fiscal and debt matters.”

“I'm glad we finally got there,” Young said of the debt deal she helped broker. “But we have warned against this brinksmanship. It's bad for the country. It's bad for the global economy.”

Negotiations over the bill were contentious, and the agreement President Joe Biden reached with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy divided members within their parties, with both those on the far right and the far left opposing it. Biden signed the legislation Saturday after the House approved it Wednesday and the Senate approved it Thursday.

Since its passage, members of Congress have disagreed as to which party the bill most benefited, with members on both sides claiming victory in the months-long battle over raising the ceiling.

The goal, however, was not “who can win,” Young said, but to avoid default.

The White House wanted “to make sure we got nothing close to what you saw in the House Republican bill,” and in that effort, they succeeded, Young said. But the end result was not a victory for Democrats or Republicans, but “a reasonable bipartisan agreement you would expect to see in [a] divided government.”