Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) called on President Joe Biden to continue debt ceiling negotiations with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) as the federal government quickly approaches a default on obligations.

The debt ceiling, a policy established by Congress that prevents the federal government from spending beyond the predetermined national debt limit of $31.4 trillion, surpassed the threshold earlier this year. McCarthy and Biden met in early February to discuss possible mechanisms to raise or eliminate the debt ceiling, a move which several House Republicans will not approve without meaningful efforts to limit future federal expenditures.

Manchin, observing that Biden has refused to meet with McCarthy for more than two months, issued a statement on Thursday calling for negotiations to continue.

“America is facing a historic economic crisis brought on by an abject failure to address our exploding national debt, chronic inflation, a looming recession, and the more immediate need to raise the debt ceiling. Our elected leaders must stop with the political games, work together and negotiate a compromise,” the centrist Democrat said. “Instead, it has been more than 78 days since President Biden last met with Speaker McCarthy. This signals a deficiency of leadership, and it must change. The fact is we are long past time for our elected leaders to sit down and discuss how to solve this impending debt ceiling crisis.”

McCarthy recently introduced a budget plan that would return expenditures to fiscal year 2022 levels, raise the debt ceiling for the next year, and limit annual spending growth to 1% over the next decade. The plan mirrors a proposal introduced by the House Freedom Caucus, a bloc of conservative Republicans who said they would consider voting to raise the debt ceiling contingent upon acceptance of their framework.

White House Deputy Press Secretary Andrew Bates countered in a statement that McCarthy is “engaging in dangerous economic hostage taking” and “breaking with the bipartisan norm” he previously followed, while Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said the lawmaker “continues to bumble us toward a catastrophic default.”

Manchin, on the other hand, contended that the refusal from Biden to “even negotiate a reasonable and commonsense compromise” poses considerable risk to the nation.

“I applaud Speaker McCarthy for putting forward a proposal that would prevent default and rein in federal spending. While I do not agree with everything proposed, the fact of the matter is that it is the only bill actually moving through Congress that would prevent default,” he continued. “For the sake of the country, I urge President Biden to come to the table, propose a plan for real and substantive spending cuts and deficit reduction, and negotiate now.”

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Manchin faces re-election next year in his heavily Republican home state. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (I-AZ) and Sen. Jon Tester (D-MT) have recently sought to create distance between themselves and the White House as they likewise launch re-election campaigns.

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen previously warned lawmakers that she was forced to implement “extraordinary measures” to fund federal agencies until early June, after which the government will default on obligations unless lawmakers suspend or raise the debt limit. Present increases in the national debt, however, are unsustainable since the government’s current outstanding obligations are nearing $31.7 trillion, equivalent to more than 120% of the nation’s gross domestic product, while maintenance costs are increasing due to a recent rise in interest rates.

Would it surprise you that a top Biden official is accused of doling out cushy, well-paying government jobs and contracts to her liberal friends?

No, probably not, but it is surprising that the Associated Press has temporarily shed its Democrat-Media Complex credentials and reported that the Department of Justice’s Inspector General is investigating Anne Milgram, President Joe Biden’s Drug and Enforcement Agency chief, for allegedly rewarding her cronies with no-bid contracts.

Milgram is the former attorney general of New Jersey and a former law professor. Now, the IG is looking at millions of dollars in taxpayers’ money allegedly given out for “strategic planning and communication” and other contracts to her friends. According to the AP, the pay for such contracts was given “at costs far exceeding pay for government officials.”

“Some of these deals look very swampy,” Scott Amey, general counsel of the nonpartisan Project on Government Oversight, told the AP.

Also included in the report is a $1.4 million payment made to the firm WilmerHale for an outside review of DEA foreign operations and how to prevent misconduct and reduce scandals. That review, the AP noted, was widely criticized for not being as thorough as it should have been. Who helped lead that review? Well, none other than former U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara’s right-hand man, Boyd Johnson. Bharara, according to the media outlet, is a close friend of Milgram.

One of the other authors of the study was 87-year-old DEA veteran John Lawn, whose knowledge of foreign practices related mostly to the 1980s. Post-government employment, Lawn was in charge of a beverage industry group that funded an alcohol research study led by Milgram’s mother.

Adding to the swampiness is the fact that the typical government-bidding process was discarded. The DEA argued that the “threat of illicit foreign drugs to the health and safety of the American public has never been greater” and required “urgency ” to complete the review.

Instead, the review took nearly a year and a half to complete when it was supposed to take six months at most.

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One former DEA official, Matthew Donahue, described that review as “a complete waste of taxpayers’ money.”  Donahue had led the DEA’s foreign operations unit but retired after he allegedly “butted heads” with Milgram, according to the AP.

“It’s something that could’ve been written in three days,” Donahue said of the finished product from WilmerHale. He also added that he and other key DEA officials and used publicly available information from press reports.

At least one lawmaker is now attempting to hold Milgram and the DEA accountable. According to the AP, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) sent Johnson a request for records and information regarding his relationship with the DEA chief.

“Though DEA originally billed this report as a ‘comprehensive review’ of DEA’s foreign operations strategy, the report glosses over or ignores serious shortcomings at the agency and spends much of its 49 pages quoting from publicly available documents that one could have pulled off a web site,” Grassley said.

He added that WilmerHale’s review was “stunningly vague.”

There are other potential scandals, too, documented in the AP’s story.

For many, this will come as no surprise that a federal bureaucrat with connections to New Jersey and New York Democrats might be involved in corruption. It’s just another day in The Swamp.

The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

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