Dan Coats, the top US intelligence official, urged Congress to tackle the ballooning national debt, saying it posed a “dire threat” to economic and national security.
In presenting Congress with the US intelligence community’s annual global threat assessment — which ranged from the nuclear crisis on the Korean peninsula to Russian interference in US elections — Mr Coats called for action to prevent a “fiscal crisis . . . that truly undermines our ability to ensure our national security”.
“The failure to address our long-term fiscal situation has increased the national debt to over $20tn,” Mr Coats, the director of national intelligence, told the Senate intelligence committee. “This situation is unsustainable . . . and represents a dire threat to our economic and national security.”