Janet Yellen says she wants to get rid of the debt ceiling

• Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen on Thursday said she would support ending the debt limit.
• Yellen recently said the government needed to raise the debt ceiling by October 18.
• The House passed a bill to suspend the debt ceiling, but the Senate is likely to block it.

Amid the crisis around whether the US government will be able to pay its bills in roughly three weeks, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said she would support getting rid of the debt ceiling.

Yellen was asked Thursday before the House Financial Services Committee whether she'd support getting rid of the debt ceiling, which sets a hard cap on the amount of money the federal government is allowed to borrow. In short, she said yes and called the law "very destructive."

Yellen's answer pointed out the fundamental tension between Congress authorizing spending and then needing to separately authorize the borrowing needed to pay for that spending.

"I believe when Congress legislates expenditures and puts in place tax policy that determines taxes, those are the crucial decisions Congress is making," Yellen said. "And if to finance those spending and tax decisions it's necessary to issue additional debt, I believe it's very destructive to put the president and myself, the Treasury secretary, in a situation where we might be unable to pay the bills that result from those past decisions."

Other Treasury secretaries have also advocated getting rid of the law. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner said in 2012 - between the two Obama-era debt ceiling fights - that "it would have been time a long time ago to eliminate it." In 2013, The Washington Post assembled a long list of economic and policy luminaries who favored abolishing the debt ceiling, including the former Treasury secretaries Robert Rubin, Larry Summers, and Paul O'Neill.

Yellen said in a letter Tuesday that the government would run out of money by October 18 if the debt ceiling were not raised or suspended.

"At that point, we expect Treasury would be left with very limited resources that would be depleted quickly," the letter said. "It is uncertain whether we could continue to meet all the nation's commitments after that date."

Yellen has previously expressed that not raising the limit could be a serious issue, threatening the US economy and the dollar's global standing.

"I can't think of anything more harmful to the role of the dollar than failing to raise the debt ceiling," Yellen previously said.

The House passed a bill meant to both suspend the debt ceiling and avert a government shutdown, but the Senate blocked it. A separate bill just to raise the debt ceiling passed the House on Wednesday, but that is likely to also be voted down when it reaches the Senate.