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(WASHINGTON) — With the clock ticking for lawmakers to reach a debt ceiling deal or risk an unprecedented default, several emergency scenarios and short-term fixes are being debated.

A White House meeting between President Joe Biden and congressional leaders on Tuesday, which was the first major discussion between the parties in months, ended without a deal.

Staffers have been meeting daily since then to try to make progress, according to the White House, and the leaders are expected to meet again early next week.

But lawmakers are barreling toward default as early as June, according to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, though the exact date is uncertain.

Democrats say raising the debt ceiling is nonnegotiable and argue it should be done without conditions, while Republicans are pushing to tie long-sought federal spending cuts to any increase.

Two potential areas of agreement in budget negotiations appeared to have emerged: unspent COVID-19 money and energy permitting reforms.

But if there’s no deal between Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, here are possible options being discussed to avoid or delay default.

A short-term fix

Lawmakers could agree to raise debt ceiling for a short period of time to avoid default while negotiations continue on federal spending. The issue would most likely be punted until Sept. 30, which is the end of the fiscal year.

Biden this week signaled a possible compromise on unspent COVID-19 money, saying he would consider clawing back those funds as Republicans have proposed — but didn’t say whether that would be part of debt limit talks.

“I’m not ruling anything out,” Biden said when asked Tuesday whether he’d support a short-term increase.

But neither side seems all-in on such a scenario.

“He’s gotta stop ignoring problems,” McCarthy said about Biden. “And why continue to kick the can down the road? Let’s solve it now.”

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre also said a short-term fix wasn’t the administration’s “plan” either.

Invoking the 14th Amendment

The impasse has raised questions about whether the Biden administration can unilaterally act to avoid default by essentially declaring the debt ceiling unconstitutional.

“I have been considering the 14th Amendment,” Biden told reporters on Tuesday. But he expressed concern it would be litigated and take months to resolve, ultimately not solving the problem fast enough.

The 14th Amendment states, “the validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.”

McCarthy and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell have rejected the idea. “Unconstitutionally acting without Congress is also not an option,” McConnell said.

Payment prioritization, trillion-dollar coin and other tools

Some have said the Treasury Department could prioritize some payments if the debt limit is not increased. The GOP-led House Ways and Means Committee advanced a bill in March that would require the Treasury to first pay all principal and interest on the national debt, then all Social Security and Medicare benefits.

But officials have questioned how feasible payment prioritization is, and economists have predicted it would still likely lead to job losses and higher unemployment

Yellen told the House panel in March that such a scenario was just “default by another name.”

“The government, on average, makes millions of payments each day, and our systems are built to pay all of our bills on time and not to pick and choose which bills to pay,” Yellen said. “It would be an exceptionally risky, untested and radical departure from normal payment practices of agencies across the federal government.”

Another idea floated in past debt ceiling battles and now is the minting of a trillion-dollar coin — or a coin of another large denomination — by the Treasury to keep paying its bills.

Biden revealed Tuesday that his team hadn’t looked into the idea of a trillion-dollar coin as a potential workaround, and Yellen previously dismissed it as a “gimmick.”

“The only responsible path forward here is for Congress and the administration to work together to expeditiously pass a debt ceiling increase. Any scenario that does not envision a passage of a debt limit increase prior to the deadline puts at significant risk the safety and soundness of the U.S. dollar and the U.S. markets and the U.S. economy,” Chris Campbell, chief policy strategist at the financial services firm Kroll and a former assistant Treasury secretary, told ABC News.

“That being said, any serious Secretary of Treasury — which all of them in the United States have been — I’m certain are carefully reviewing their options should Congress and the administration not come to an agreement by the time that the debt ceiling is breached,” Campbell said “In the extremely unlikely event that that occurs, I’m certain that the Treasury Secretary would have a series of options at her disposal to be able to work through the challenges should that occur.”

Discharge petition

House Democrats have been laying the groundwork for a discharge petition, ABC News previously reported.

The petition is a complicated procedural tool that would allow members of the House to move a bill out of a committee and bring it to the floor without the support of the majority party leadership.

The petition requires 218 signatures to force a vote, meaning Democrats would need to get the support of at least five Republicans, and timing constraints.

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(WASHINGTON) — The last time Joe Biden and Donald Trump shared a debate stage, the Democratic presidential nominee repeatedly attacked his opponent over his administration’s immigration policies.

“This is the first president in the history of the United States of America that anybody seeking asylum has to do it in another country. That’s never happened before. That’s never happened before in our country,” Biden said with outrage.

“You come to the United States, and you make your case. That’s how you seek asylum, based on the following premise: Why I deserve it under American law,” the former vice president added at the time.

But now, that very criticism has come back around more than two years into Biden’s own term because critics — including members of his own party — human rights groups, and immigration lawyers say he has now implemented something close to what his predecessor did.

“Promises broken,” tweeted Julián Castro, who served with Biden in President Barack Obama’s cabinet and ran against him during the 2020 Democratic primary.

Biden administration officials, however, are quick to reject that idea, saying the new restrictions on asylum that the Biden administration announced on Wednesday do not close off the opportunity to seek asylum like Trump tried to do.

“This is not a ban on asylum. This is very different than the asylum ban that President Trump issued,” Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told ABC News Wednesday. “Our president has led the expansion of lawful pathways more than anyone in our history.”

The ban is different from Trump’s in a critical way. After penalizing Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador with cuts in aid, the Trump administration was able to force the three Central American countries to sign agreements saying they were so-called “safe countries” — meaning ones in which migrants seeking asylum would have to apply for the legal protection.

This meant that migrants reaching the southern U.S. border could not qualify for asylum if they transited one of those three countries — a policy that a federal judge ultimately struck down in Trump’s final days in office.

“Rather than ensure their safety, the rule increases the risk asylum applicants will be subjected to violence,” Judge Jon Tigar wrote, adding it was “inconsistent with existing asylum laws” and “deprives vulnerable asylum applicants of essential procedural safeguards.”

But Biden’s rule is quite similar. It requires a migrant seeking asylum to have first applied for and been denied the legal protection in another country. If not, it doesn’t mean an outright rejection like under Trump, but a “presumption of ineligibility.” In other words, an asylum-seeker would still have the chance to apply for asylum after crossing the border, but they’d have to meet a “higher threshold of proof” that they have a “credible fear” of returning to their home country and therefore qualify,” Mayorkas said.

That’s not the only restriction, either.

Migrants must make an appointment to request asylum at a port of entry using the U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s app called CBP One. If not, and they cross the border without documents and outside a port of entry, they could face removal and a five-year ban on reentry.

Like Mayorkas referenced, Biden administration officials also point to the expanded lawful pathways to the U.S., including a parole program that admits up to 30,000 Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans a month — but only if they have a U.S.-based sponsor and apply from overseas and not after crossing the border. The administration has also committed to accepting this year up to 100,000 Guatemalans, Hondurans and Salvadorans who have family sponsors already in the U.S.

But migrant’s rights advocates say it’s no alternative to the right to law, enshrined under U.S. law. Like Trump’s so-called transit ban, they say, Biden’s new policy runs afoul of the section that specifies that migrants can apply for asylum once on U.S. soil “whether or not at a designated port of arrival.”

“At a time of unprecedented global displacement, the Biden administration has elected to defy decades of humanitarian protections enshrined in U.S. law and international agreements,” said Lee Williams, chief programs officer at Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, one of the largest U.S. resettlement agencies.

In particular, Williams condemned the requirement to first seek asylum in another country “as ludicrous as it is life-threatening” and the CBP One app “a life-or-death lottery.”

The app in particular has been the subject of ridicule because of glitches, including documented difficulty of taking photos of migrants with darker skin and the difficulty of obtaining an appointment, especially for families traveling together. CBP announced changes earlier this week, like prioritizing applicants who have been waiting the longest and making appointments available on a regular basis, not all at once at a scheduled time.

But for many, Biden’s new policies are particularly disheartening because of the very commitments that the president made during his campaign. On his campaign website, for example, he pledged to build a “fair and humane immigration system… ensuring the dignity of migrants and upholding their legal right to seek asylum.”

But even some of Biden’s own staffers have been disappointed. Jeremy Konyndyk, who was a senior Biden appointee at the U.S. Agency for International Development, said the policy “runs directly contrary to President Biden’s repeated and vocal promises to undo his predecessor’s weakening of U.S. asylum protections.”

“The U.S. reaction to unprecedented numbers of people needing refuge here should not be — must not be — simply changing policies to more easily deny them protection. Yet that will be the essential effect of this new policy,” added Konyndyk, now president of Refugees International.

ABC News’s Karen Travers contributed to this report.

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(GOFFSTOWN, N.H.) — Former President Donald Trump’s town hall on CNN Wednesday featured no shortage of theatrics, from calling moderator Kaitlin Collins “nasty” to sparking laughs from a supportive audience with a jab against E. Jean Carroll, the author who accused him of rape and won a civil case in which a jury found him liable for battery and defamation.

But during the 70-minute forum, Trump also faced policy questions he either dodged or answered head-on, potentially revealing contours of a possible second Trump administration.

Here are five areas where Trump took new policy positions — or evaded.

Abortion

Trump hailed the Supreme Court overruling Roe v. Wade a “great victory,” taking credit because he nominated three of the conservative justices who voted to do so.

When it comes to what’s next, though, Trump was evasive.

“President Trump is going to make a determination what he thinks is great for the country and what is fair for the country,” Trump said when Collins pressed him on his position on some kind of national ban.

“I’m looking at a solution that’s going to work.”

Of last year’s Supreme Court ruling, Trump said, “You know that they wanted to bring it back to the states but that was probably the least important part of that victory,” but he didn’t explicitly say that’s what he’d support over federal legislation.

The comments served as a microcosm for the GOP’s broader struggles with abortion after Democratic fury over last year’s Supreme Court decision helped turn what was supposed to be a red wave midterm election into one that saw Democrats expand their Senate majority and minimize their House losses.

Trump has struggled to find his footing on the issue, sparking backlash from typically supportive evangelical and anti-abortion groups after blaming Republicans’ underwhelming midterm results on candidates who supported stringent restrictions on the procedure.

The former president met last week with Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, a powerful anti-abortion advocacy group in the U.S., after which Marjorie Dannenfelser, the group’s president, called the meeting “terrific.”

Debt ceiling

Trump made waves with his comments on the debt ceiling, seeming to put a historic and potentially calamitous default firmly on the table if Republicans don’t succeed in pushing for spending cuts.

“I say to the Republicans out there — congressmen, senators — if they don’t give you massive cuts, you’re going to have to do a default,” he said.

The remarks come as Republicans and Democrats negotiate over how to lift the limit on how much the government can borrow to pay its existing obligations.

Republicans are saying they’d only vote for an increase if President Joe Biden and congressional Democrats agree to significant spending cuts, while Democrats say a clean debt ceiling increase should pass Congress, warning the threat of default is too great to be negotiated over.

The talks were jumpstarted after Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said the government could run out of money to pay its expenses as early as June 1.

Trump, when pressed, doubled down on saying he would endorse default if negotiations reach a stalemate.

“We might as well do it now because you’ll do it later,” he said.

Ukraine

Trump claimed he would be able to bring a halt to the fighting in Ukraine but declined to come down firmly on Kyiv’s side in the fight against Russia’s invasion.

He boasted that if he were president, he could end the war in 24 hours but did not detail what he wanted an end to look like, dodging on whether he wanted Ukraine or Russia to win.

“I don’t think in terms of winning and losing,” he said. “I think in terms of getting it settled so we stop killing all these people.”

The comments followed Trump’s trend of being softer on Russia than many other Republicans.

During his administration, he said he believed Russian President Vladimir Putin’s assertion that Moscow didn’t interfere in the 2016 election — a stance at odds with the CIA’s own findings. And Wednesday, he declined to call Putin a war criminal over the invasion of Ukraine, which has seen hundreds of civilians killed, including many children.

“If you say he’s a war criminal, it will be a lot tougher to get a deal to get this thing stopped,” he said.

A possible return of family separations at the border

Trump sparked international backlash when he instituted a policy in 2018 that separated families at the border, ultimately rescinding the rule amid the outcry.

But on Wednesday, Trump admitted during the town hall that while the policy “sounds harsh,” he wouldn’t take it off the table.

“Well, when you have that policy, people don’t come,” he said. “If a family hears that they’re going to be separated, they love their family, they don’t come.”

Pardons for insurrectionists

Trump, who is accused of trying to overturn the 2020 election, repeated false claims that the voting was marred by widespread fraud, but he broke new ground on how he’d handle those convicted and imprisoned over taking part in the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection.

“I am inclined to pardon many of them,” Trump told Collins. “I can’t say for every single one because a couple of them, probably, they got out of control.”

Trump did not delineate what charge or activity would be considered too severe to not qualify for a pardon, though the comments mark the first time that Trump has said he would consider freeing the lion’s share of the over 900 people who have been criminally charged over their involvement in or planning of the riot.

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