In the early years of the United States, pretty much continuously from its founding

in 1776 until 1917, Congress had to give the okay on every individual debt the government wanted to issue.

In practice, this meant that Congress would need to pass legislation for almost everything the government wanted to pay for,

and that meant typically paying for them with money earned through bonds,

which are debt instruments sold by the government, to fund things. And that meant at the time there was a lot less money flowing through the government,

but it also inherently limited the sorts of things that could be funded to begin with, because than the Treasury being able to issue debt when it made sense to do so to pay for existing programs or new ones that some facet of the government wanted to implement, they would instead need to get permission from Congress and then a successful piece of legislation would need to be passed for each and every new or recurring bit of money raising.

A super tedious way of managing finances that made a lot more sense in the early days of the nation, but a lot less with every year that passed, because of how

limited the government inherently was with their hands tied in this way, and because of how

other aspects of the government and the funding of the government evolved over time.

In 1917, though, in the midst of World War I, Congress passed the

Second Liberty Bond Act, which gave the U.S. Treasury more leeway to basically spend what they wanted

on whichever projects and priorities made sense as long as they didn't go over a congressionally approved limit.

This limit, often called the debt limit or debt ceiling, also had sub-limits within the larger

overall limit as to how much of that total spending could be derived from different categories

of debt, like bonds or treasury bills.

That segmentation was removed with the passing of the Public Debt Act in 1939, and the Public

Debt Act of 1941 raised that now non-segmented limit to $65 billion. So that was the overall cap on the amount of debt

that could be issued by the U.S. Treasury, and they could now use whichever instruments they thought

made the most sense when issuing debt, rather than being artificially limited to just a certain

amount of bonds and

treasuries and bills and securities and so on.

Most years following that second public debt act, this debt ceiling was increased, and it

...