By PAUL WISEMAN, Related Press
WASHINGTON (AP) — Moody’s Rankings stripped the U.S. authorities of its prime credit standing Friday, citing successive governments’ failure to cease a rising tide of debt.
Moody’s lowered the score from a gold-standard Aaa to Aa1 however stated the US “retains exceptional credit strengths such as the size, resilience and dynamism of its economy and the role of the U.S. dollar as global reserve currency.”
Moody’s is the final of the three main score companies to decrease the federal authorities’s credit score. Customary & Poor’s downgraded federal debt in 2011 and Fitch Rankings adopted in 2023.
In a press release, Moody’s stated: “We expect federal deficits to widen, reaching nearly 9% of (the U.S. economy) by 2035, up from 6.4% in 2024, driven mainly by increased interest payments on debt, rising entitlement spending, and relatively low revenue generation.”
Extending President Donald Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, a precedence of the Republican-controlled Congress, Moody’s stated, would add $4 trillion over the subsequent decade to the federal main deficit (which doesn’t embrace curiosity funds).
A gridlocked political system has been unable to deal with America’s big deficits. Republicans reject tax will increase, and Democrats are reluctant to chop spending.
On Friday, Home Republicans didn’t push a giant package deal of tax breaks and spending cuts by way of the Funds Committee. A small group of hard-right Republican lawmakers, insisting on steeper cuts to Medicaid and President Joe Biden’s inexperienced vitality tax breaks, joined all Democrats in opposing it.
Initially Printed: Might 16, 2025 at 5:55 PM EDT