Friday’s debt-ceiling meeting between President Joe Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has been postponed until next week to give the staff more time.
A White House spokesperson tells Yahoo Finance that aides will continue working and that the plan is for the leaders to meet again early next week.
“I don’t think there’s enough progress for the leaders to get back together,” said Speaker McCarthy of the the delay during a press conference at the Capitol, even as he also added that the talks had been productive.
The delay comes after two days of staff level discussions that have featured goodwill but apparently little concrete progress.
One source familiar with the talks described them to Yahoo Finance less as negotiations but as “idea sessions more than anything else.”
This person added that an unexpectedly tight deadline of June 1 and the fact that both sides have remained in “posture mode” means that anything but a very limited deal - if any - is probably all that remains possible without a short-term extension.
Another source familiar with the meetings said that the delay was a positive development and a sign that meetings are progressing.
White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre added Thursday afternoon that the talks had been focused on budget and spending issues. "That’s regular order, that is something that has been done year after year," she said.
Stop and start talks
The news of yet another hiccup - just weeks before a June 1 deadline that Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has said could lead to economic calamity - is likely to further unsettle observers who are hoping to avoid a market rattling default.
The delay also comes after an unproductive and heated meeting among the leaders on Tuesday that saw clear personal animosity between the two lead negotiators during remarks afterwards. Biden said in his comments that McCarthy was occasionally “over the top” during that Tuesday gathering in the Oval Office.
On Thursday evening, Speaker McCarthy said it was in everyone’s interest to let the staff continue to meet before again claiming he hadn’t seen “seriousness” from the White House about avoiding default.
The sides also appear to have gotten farther apart over the issue of Biden gradually warming to an idea to use the 14th amendment to make a possible end run around McCarthy, who called discussion of the maneuver a sign of weakness.
Both sides have also repeatedly batted down a suggestion of a short-term extension to give the sides more time to negotiate.
The ongoing standoff has also led many Washington insiders to begin making other plans around issues that had initially expected to be at the center of the talks.
One example is the issue of energy permitting reform, which McCarthy and House Republicans have called their top priority. Sens. Joe Manchin (D-WV) and John Barasso (R-WY) convened a Senate hearing Thursday to restart their efforts on that issue, with Manchin saying “we absolutely have to get permitting reform done for the good of the country.”
But he didn't discuss it in the context of the debt ceiling. Instead he promised a bipartisan Senate bill this summer.
That development was first signaled Wednesday when White House Senior Advisor John Podesta said at a Bipartisan Policy Center event the issues like energy “should be uncoupled from the terrible consequences of threatening the full faith and credit of the United States.”
Podesta added that he thought an energy debate was possible in the Senate in the weeks ahead.
“If you want to talk about the budget, we should talk about the budget. If you want to talk about permitting, we should talk about permitting.”
This post has been updated.
Ben Werschkul is Washington correspondent for Yahoo Finance.
Click here for politics news related to business and money
Read the latest financial and business news from Yahoo Finance