WASHINGTON, Feb. 6 (Xinhua) -- U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin on Tuesday urged lawmakers to raise the country's debt limit in order to avoid a government default.

"I respectfully urge Congress to act as soon as possible to protect the full faith in credit of the United States by increasing the statutory debt limit as soon as possible," said Mnuchin at a hearing on Capitol Hill.

The debt limit is the maximum amount of debt that the Treasury Department can issue to the public or to other federal agencies.

The limit was suspended in September last year. The suspension expired in December, and then the Treasury Department had to take "extraordinary measures" to borrow additional funds without breaching the debt limit.

According to estimates by the Congressional Budget Office, the Treasury will most likely run out of cash in the first half of March this year, which means that the Congress has to raise the debt limit before mid-March in order to avoid government default.

In 2011, the Congress failed to raise the debt limit which led the credit-rating agency Standard & Poor's to downgrade the U.S. sovereign rating for the first time in the American history.