Hey, good morning. I'm Playbook co-author Eugene Daniels. It's Tuesday, May 16th. Here's what's driving the day ahead in Washington.

Debt limit, debt limit, debt limit. It is the only game in town right now. President Biden today is meeting with congressional leaders in the afternoon to once again negotiate the ends and outs of what a debt

limit slash spending cuts bill would look like. He is leaving Wednesday to head to Japan for the G7,

then Papua New Guinea and Australia. All that's going to take about a week. So that cuts down on the

time that they actually have to negotiate. Also, there aren't a lot of days that the House and the

Senate are in session together. So they're have to negotiate. Also, there aren't a lot of days that the House and the Senate are in session together.

So they're running up against a serious, serious deadline here. And all the while we have this debt limit that we literally have to raise in order for catastrophe not to be reached.

Yesterday, Janet Yellen, the Treasury Secretary, said that

June 1st still seems like the X date where they will have to take extraordinary measures in order to

pay the bills that the United States has incurred. And so this meeting is going to be key. At this

point, we haven't gotten much out of the meetings. Speaker McCarthy has

said they're not useful. Other House Republicans are hopeful that they can get less people at the

negotiating table. So they can convince the creature of the Senate Joe Biden to cut a deal. They think he'd be

more amenable to some of the things they want if they can kind of get him alone. I don't think it's

going to happen like that.

And one of the things that is fracturing the Democratic Party right now, and the spending cuts part of this conversation, is whether or not work requirements for SNAP and TAMP, these programs should be on the table.

President Biden kind of freaked people out recently, seemingly putting those on the table. And to kind of get deeper in what's fracturing the Democratic Party right now is Meredith Lee Hill,

one of our food and ag reporters that covers the Hill and kind of the White House as well.

Meredith, what is going on? Good morning.

Hi there. So essentially, it is a bit of a standoff between House Republicans and the president over a couple of key items right now.

And one of those big items that House Republicans in particular want are expanded work requirements for a couple of different key safety net programs that Democrats for a very long time have worked

very hard to protect. The president has said he has ruled out creating new work requirements

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