What they’re saying: Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, in a letter to Congress last week, urged members to “protect the full faith and credit of the United States by acting as soon as possible.”

Don’t hold your breath. Congress is focused on the infrastructure bill right now. So far, no one’s started seriously grappling with the debt ceiling, partly because Treasury is still sitting on about $450 billion in cash.

Treasury will use “extraordinary measures in order to prevent the United States from defaulting on its obligations,” says Yellen in her letter — but given the uncertainty engendered by the pandemic, no one knows how long those measures might last.

The best estimate of a “drop dead date,” from the Bipartisan Policy Center, is early November, but no one wants this saga to drag on that long.