'Avoid at all costs': Former GOP Senate staffer raises alarms about party reviving 'disaster' debt ceiling plan

A week after Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) had to give in to the demands of the House Republicans' Freedom Caucus, the Washington Post reports that he agreed to engage in a fiscal showdown that at least one former GOP Senate staffer thinks would be a "disaster."

The GOP's plan would allow the Biden Administration to identify and continue the most necessary federal payments, but forces them to identify spending cuts if the debt ceiling were to be raised.

The basic idea behind the plan would be to tell the Department of Treasury to pay for essential social safety net payments such as Social Security and Medicare, while then declining to pay for other already allocated government spending -- which could in theory defund the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Brian Riedl, a former staffer for former Sen. Rob Portman (R-OH), told the Post that he ran an analysis of a similar plan's impacts on the government just over a decade ago and he determined it would be a terrible idea.

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“Studying this in 2011 convinced us this would be a really bad idea and something we really did not want to happen,” Riedl told the Post. “We didn’t end the exercise saying, ‘This is feasible and smart.’ We said, ‘Let’s avoid this at all costs because it’s going to be a disaster.'”