The Congressional Budget Office on Monday extended its estimate of when the debt limit must be raised, stretching its predicted “X-date” range to begin in mid-August and run through the end of September.

That’s when the agency estimates the “extraordinary measures” as well as reductions of the Treasury Department’s emergency cash buffer that are currently being used to allow continued borrowing will be exhausted.

The CBO in March estimated the Treasury’s cash on hand and ability to borrow could be exhausted by Aug. 1. But in its monthly budget review for May, the agency said the past three months of federal taxes collected and spending suggested the X-date would not occur until two weeks later at the earliest.

The new debt limit projection was tucked into the agency’s monthly budget update, which found a nearly $1.4 trillion deficit for fiscal 2025 so far through the end of May. That’s running about $160 billion higher than the previous year’s deficit through the same time period.

While revenue is higher by 6%, driven in part by increased tariff revenue, spending outpaced that figure, coming in 8% higher through May. Extra Social Security payments driven by last December’s law boosting benefits for some public sector retirees and higher interest payments on the debt were big contributors to that spending growth.

It’s not clear what impact, if any, the new CBO projection will have on House and Senate Republicans who are trying to complete action by the July Fourth recess on a reconciliation bill that would include at least a $4 trillion increase in the debt limit.

On May 9, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent wrote to lawmakers urging them to raise the debt limit by mid-July. He wrote that based on tax receipts from the April filing season, there is a “reasonable probability” the cash and bookkeeping measures would be exhausted in August while Congress is on recess.

Trump says Iran rejects latest enrichment plan

President Donald Trump told reporters at the White House on Monday that Iran appeared to have rejected a key element of an American proposal aimed at breaking the deadlock in the negotiations over the future of the country’s nuclear program.

Iran wants to continue enriching uranium on Iranian soil, the president said, a step that would give it continued access to the fuel that could be used to make a nuclear weapon.

“They’re just asking for things that you can’t do,” Trump said at the end of an economic event with business and Wall Street leaders. “They don’t want to give up what they have to give up. You know what that is: They seek enrichment.”

Trump said U.S. and Iranian officials would meet Thursday, but he did not say where or whether the session would be headed by his special envoy, Steve Witkoff.

The Trump administration had proposed a preliminary arrangement that would have permitted Iran to continue to enrich uranium at low levels until an international consortium, which would include Iran and Arab states, began manufacturing fuel for customers around the Middle East.

Tenn. GOP rep. to leave House early

The House Homeland Security Committee’s chairman, Republican Rep. Mark Green of Tennessee, announced Monday that he will retire from Congress once the House votes again on the sprawling tax and budget policy bill backed by President Donald Trump.

In a statement, Green said he was offered a private sector opportunity that was “that was too exciting to pass up” so he informed House Speaker Mike Johnson on Monday of his retirement plans. The move comes more than a year after Green announced he wouldn’t run again in 2024, but changed his mind when fellow Republicans implored him to stick around.

Green’s next election would have been in 2026.

Green voted for Trump’s sweeping legislation when it passed the House last month. The bill is now in the Senate’s hands, and would need to return to the House for agreement on any changes. Trump wants the bill on his desk for his signature by July 4.

Green’s delayed departure could help with the GOP’s narrow margins in the House. Republican leaders need every vote they can get on their big tax bill, which they managed to pass last month by a single vote and will have to pass again once changes are made in the Senate. They now have a 220-212 majority.

Green’s seat will be decided in a special election.

Jury discord cited in Weinstein case

The jury foreperson in Harvey Weinstein’s sex crimes retrial complained Monday that some jurors were prodding others to change their minds, talking about the former studio boss’ past and going beyond the charges.

“I feel like they are attacking, talking together, fight together. I don’t like it,” the foreperson said, according to a transcript of his closed-door conversation with Judge Curtis Farber and the prosecution and defense teams.

The foreperson said he believed the jury was tasked only with considering “what happened at the time, in the moment” of the crimes alleged by the prosecution, but others “are pushing people, talking about his past.”

“I feel it is not fair taking the decision about the past,” the foreperson said.

He added that others pushed people “to change their minds,” when he thought they instead should seek to answer one another’s questions and “let that person make a decision.”

He didn’t specify what parts of Weinstein’s past came up. An Oscar-winning movie producer, Weinstein was one of Hollywood’s most powerful figures until a series of sexual misconduct allegations against him became public in 2017, fueling the #MeToo movement and eventually leading to criminal charges.

Oklahoma judge stays man’s execution

An Oklahoma judge granted a temporary stay of execution Monday to a man whose transfer to death row was expedited by the Trump administration and who was scheduled to receive a lethal injection this week.

John Fitzgerald Hanson, 61, was set to die Thursday for killing a Tulsa woman in 1999.

Hanson’s lawyers have argued that he did not receive a fair clemency hearing last month before the state’s five-member Pardon and Parole Board. They claim board member Sean Malloy was biased because he worked for the Tulsa County District Attorney’s Office when Hanson was being prosecuted.

Malloy has said he never worked on Hanson’s case at the time and was unfamiliar with it before the clemency hearing. Malloy was one of three members who voted 3-2 to deny Hanson a clemency recommendation.

Frederick Forsyth, spy novelist, dies at 86

Frederick Forsyth, who used his early experience as a British foreign correspondent as fodder for a series of swashbuckling, bestselling thrillers in the 1970s, including “The Day of the Jackal,” “The Odessa File” and “The Dogs of War,” died on Monday at his home in Jordans, north of London. He was 86.

His literary representative, Jonathan Lloyd, did not specify a cause, saying only that the death followed a short illness.

Forsyth was a master of the geopolitical nail-biter, writing novels embedded in an international demimonde populated by spies, mercenaries and political extremists.

He wrote 24 books, including 14 novels, and sold more than 75 million copies.

Though he set many of his best works during the Cold War of the 1960s and ’70s, Forsyth often chose stories and characters operating apart from the U.S.-Soviet rivalry, in post-colonial conflicts in Africa, for example, or involving Nazi hunters in Europe. His novel “The Fourth Protocol” (1984), which many critics considered his best, offered a twisting tale of nuclear espionage and radical-left politics in Britain.

Born in Kent, in southern England, in 1938, Forsyth served as a Royal Air Force pilot before becoming a foreign correspondent.

In 2015, Forsyth told the BBC that he had also worked for the British intelligence agency MI6 for many years, starting from when he covered a civil war in Nigeria in the 1960s.

— From news services