One result is clear as Washington seeks a fiscal deal in the debt ceiling stalemate: the ambitious COVID-19 era of government spending to cope with the pandemic and reconstruction is giving way to a new focus on tailored investment and curbing of shortages.

President

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Biden has said recovering unspent COVID-19 money is on the table in budget talks with Congress. While the White House has threatened to veto

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Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy

(R-Bakersfield)s

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with its devastating cuts to federal programs, the government has shown a willingness to consider other budget caps.

The end result is a reversal from just a few years ago when Congress passed and when…

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President

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Trump signed the landmark $2.2 trillion CARES bill at the start of the 2020 public health crisis. It’s a dramatic recast, even as Biden’s bipartisan infrastructure bill and Inflation Reduction Act now invest billions of dollars in

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pave streets, strengthen the federal safety net and restructure the American economy.

The willingness to put a lot more money into big problems right now has diminished significantly given what we’ve seen in recent years, said Shai Akabas, director of economic policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center, a nonpartisan organization in Washington.

The Treasury Department has warned it will run out of money to pay the country’s bills from June 1, though an estimate Friday by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office set the deadline for the first two weeks of June, prompting negotiators might gain time.

We have not yet reached the critical point, Biden told reporters on Saturday before flying to Delaware for the weekend. There is a real discussion about some changes we could all make. We’re not there yet.

Staff-level negotiators will resume talks on Saturday.

The outlines of an agreement between the White House and Congress are within reach, even if the political will to end the stalemate is uncertain. Negotiators are considering recovering some $30 billion in unused COVID-19 funds, imposing spending caps for years to come and passing reforms to facilitate construction of energy projects and other developments, according to those familiar with the employee interviews behind closed doors. They were not authorized to discuss the closed deliberations and spoke on condition of anonymity.

The White House is hesitant to enter talks, insisting it is only willing to negotiate the annual budget, not the debt ceiling, and Biden’s team is skeptical that McCarthy can strike any deal with his far-right majority in the House.

There is no deal to be made on the debt ceiling. The debt ceiling is non-negotiable,” said Karine Jean-Pierre, White House press secretary.

McCarthy’s allies say the White House has fundamentally underestimated what the new Republican leader has been able to accomplish, first in the grueling battle to become speaker of the House and now by passing the House bill with $4.5 trillion in savings as an opening bid in the negotiations. Both have encouraged McCarthy to push hard for a deal.

The White House has been wrong every time to understand where we stand with the House, said Russ Vought, president of the Center for American Renewal and Trump’s former director of the Office of Management and Budget. They are dealing with a new animal.

The country’s debt burden has exploded in recent years to $31 trillion. That’s pretty much double what it was during the last major debt-ceiling showdown a decade ago, when Biden, as Vice President of President

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Obama faced the new class of Tea Party Republicans demanding austerity in exchange for raising the debt limit.

While the debt limit policy has intensified, the national debt is nothing new. American balance sheets have been in the red for much of their history, dating back to before the Civil War. That’s because government spending routinely exceeds tax revenue, helping Americans subsidize the comforts that depend on national security, public works, a federal safety net, and basic operations to keep civil society afloat. In the US, individuals pay the majority of taxes, while corporations pay less than 10%.

Much of the COVID-19 spending approved at the start of the pandemic has run its course and government spending has returned to normal levels, experts say. That includes the free vaccines, small business payrolls, emergency payments to individuals, monthly child tax credits, and additional food aid that protected Americans and the economy.

Most of the big things we’ve done have been done, and they’ve done tremendous good, said Sharon Parrott, president of the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities in Washington.

We really showed that we know how to reduce poverty and increase health insurance in the midst of what would have been increasing hardship, she said.

Last year, Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, which was signed into law by the Republican opposition, was largely paid for with savings and new revenue elsewhere.

The popularity of some spending, particularly the child tax credits in COVID-19 relief and the Inflation Reduction Act’s efforts to address climate change, shows the country’s political appetite for the kinds of investments that some Americans believe they will fully help push the US into a 21st century economy.

Case in point: A core group of Midwestern Republican lawmakers prevented a rollback of the biofuel tax credits from the Inflation Reduction Act that their peers wanted to remove, convincing McCarthy to leave that out of the House bill. The federal money supports new investments in corn-rich farming states.

Since McCarthy’s House Republicans are now demanding spending cuts in exchange for raising the debt limit, they’re having a harder time saying which government programs and services they actually plan to cut.

House Republicans strongly oppose Biden’s claims that their bill would cut veterans

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and other services.

McCarthy, during his meeting with the president, even went so far as to tell Biden that’s a lie.

The Republicans vow to exempt the Department of Defense and veterans’ health

make sure once they prepare the actual spending bills to match the house debt ceiling proposal, but there are no written assurances that those programs won’t be cut.

In fact, Democrats say that if Republicans save defense and veterans for budget cuts, the other departments’ cuts could be as much as 22%.

Budget watchers often reiterate that the debt problem is not necessarily the level of debt, which approaches 100% of the country’s gross domestic product, but whether the federal government can continue to pay off debt, especially as interest rates rise.

On Friday, Mitch Landrieu, the Coordinator for Infrastructure Deployment, spoke from the White House about the $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill that Biden signed 18 months ago. He said it creates jobs, stimulates private investment and shows what can happen when the parties come together.

We say once in a generation because it hasn’t happened in our lifetime, and frankly, it may not happen again for the foreseeable future, he said.

__AP White House correspondent Zeke Miller contributed to this report.