US President Barack Obama said Sunday that he will not negotiate with his Republican rivals on raising the country's debt ceiling to avert a debt default of the world's largest economy.

"What I haven't been willing to negotiate, and I will not negotiate, is on the debt ceiling," Obama said in an interview with the ABC News aired Sunday.

US Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew told Congress last month that the federal government will reach its debt ceiling of 16.7 trillion US dollars by mid-October, urging Congress to raise the government's borrowing authority in a timely manner. However, Republican lawmakers insist that a debt ceiling increase should be in line with spending cuts, threatening a government shutdown. Democrats and Republicans have not agreed on the government's budget plan for the 2014 fiscal year starting on October 1.

"It's the job of Congress to come up with a budget that keeps our long-term trends down of -- or our current trends of reducing the deficit, moving forward, but also allows us to invest in the things that we need to grow," Obama stressed.

Obama said Republicans are establishing a dangerous precedent in using the debt ceiling to push for government spending cuts, noting that "never in history have we used just making sure that the US government is paying its bills as a lever to radically cut government at the kind of scale that they're talking about. It 's never happened before."