President Biden said he is expected to meet with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and other congressional leaders on Tuesday for a follow-up to their gathering last week on the debt limit, and said he believes a deal can be reached.
"I think so," Biden told reporters on Sunday when asked if Tuesday will be their next sit-down.
Washington has been under growing pressure to find an agreement on lifting the debt ceiling before June 1, the rough date when the federal government is expected to run out of cash to pay its obligations.
A planned meeting on Friday was called off the day before, after staff discussions failed to make significant headway. But that appears to have changed over the weekend.
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Staffs for the top four congressional leaders and the White House reportedly met on Saturday for further discussions.
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said she was "hopeful" about the direction of talks at the G-7 finance ministers meeting in Japan.
"I think the negotiations are very active. I’m told they have found some areas of agreement," Yellen told the Wall Street Journal.
For months, Biden and Senate Democrats insisted that they could only support a "clean" debt limit increase without any preconditions on federal spending levels. But House and Senate Republicans have coalesced around a bill led by McCarthy, R-Calif., that would raise the debt limit by $1.5 trillion in exchange for cutting back discretionary spending to fiscal 2022 levels, limiting growth for 10 years and repealing some of Biden’s key progressive agenda items.
While Democrats have made clear that they oppose the GOP bill, Biden appeared to concede that he could potentially be moved to support some form of tougher work requirements for federal benefits – though he ruled out tightening access to Medicaid.
"I voted for tougher aid programs that’s in the law now, but for Medicaid it's a different story. And so I’m waiting to hear what their exact proposal is," Biden said.
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The president did not go into detail on how staff talks were progressing in the interim but called himself an "optimist."
"It never is good to characterize a negotiation in the middle of a negotiation," Biden said on Sunday. "I remain optimistic because I'm a congenital optimist. But I really think there’s a desire on their part, as well as ours, to reach an agreement, and I think we'll be able to do it."
He also said he anticipated still leaving for his planned trip to Japan for the G-7 summit later this week.
