WASHINGTON >> The United States faces a default sometime this summer or early fall if Congress does not raise or suspend the debt ceiling, a Washington think tank warned on Wednesday.

The projection from the Bipartisan Policy Center is the latest estimate of when the government could run out of cash to pay its bills. The nation, which borrows huge sums to help pay for everything from military salaries to Social Security benefits, hit its $31.4 trillion borrowing cap Jan. 19. Since then, the Treasury Department has been employing what are known as extraordinary measures to ensure that the government has enough to pay what it owes, including payments to bondholders. “We anticipate that those emergency measures, as well as the cash that Treasury has on hand, will most likely be exhausted at some point during the summer or early fall,” Shai Akabas, the center’s director of economic policy, said.

— The New York Times