That’s what the debt ceiling arguments are about: members of Congress don’t want to take the heat for actually canceling something so they don’t remove it from the budget but then refuse to pay without some kind of token win for their campaign ads. The real debt problem is that you either need to restore taxes to pre-Bush levels or cut popular programs, but there’s no way to do either of those without being willing to negotiate and that’s currently politically untenable for one of the major parties.