In the next two weeks, President Joe Biden’s party wants to fund federal agencies and fulfill his request for billions of dollars to help hurricane-battered states, all in one bipartisan funding bundle. But their best chance to make that work likely involves prolonging their biggest political gamble to date by leaving the debt limit to haunt them come October.

Droves of Senate Republicans this week reiterated that they remain against a bipartisan agreement to raise the nation’s borrowing limit, even as the Treasury Department warns that a debt disaster could hit by mid-October. Even as that problem gets worse for Democrats, though, the urgency of disaster aid funding after Hurricane Ida slammed into red states across the Southeast is making it easier for them to win GOP votes to address the more pressing threat of a government shutdown on Oct. 1.

Top Democrats will soon have to settle a fiscal stumper: whether to tackle government funding separately from the debt limit, clearing one headache while almost certainly exacerbating another.