WASHINGTON — Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin informed congressional leaders on Friday that the government could run out of money in early September, pleading with lawmakers to reach a deal to raise the government’s borrowing limit before their August recess or risk a potentially catastrophic default.

Mr. Mnuchin, in a letter to leadership, said that while “it is impossible to identify precisely” how long the Treasury’s resources can last, updated predictions indicated that “there is a scenario in which we run out of cash in early September, before Congress reconvenes.”

“As such,” Mr. Mnuchin wrote, “I request that Congress increase the debt ceiling before Congress leaves for summer recess.”

[Read the Mnuchin letter here.]

He and Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California have spoken by phone multiple times this week, including two conversations Thursday evening, about raising the debt ceiling and preventing a round of governmentwide spending cuts from sweeping across all federal agencies next year.

“I am personally convinced that we should act on the caps and the debt ceiling,” Ms. Pelosi told reporters Thursday evening, in between phone calls with the secretary. “Prior to recess.”

Negotiations between lawmakers and administration officials on Capitol Hill have recently intensified, as the threat of what could be an disastrous fiscal crisis grows closer.

The federal government has already run a $747 billion budget deficit for the 2019 fiscal year, which ends in September — a 23 percent increase from the year before. That’s an unusually large increase given the strength of economic growth.

Total personal and corporate income tax levels are down slightly from the previous year, Treasury Department statistics show. Federal spending has risen — particularly for national defense and for health care programs — and so have the interest costs on the growing national debt. Those trends reflect Washington’s free-spending ways and the rising costs of an aging population as the Baby Boom generation draws Social Security and Medicare benefits.

Those dynamics have yet to spark a renewed interest in the deficit, but they are intensifying pressure on lawmakers to raise the debt limit, or risk economic catastrophe if they do not.

A 2018 budget deal in Congress suspended the limit, which constrains the amount of money the government may borrow to continue paying its bills, until March 1 of this year. Once that deadline passed, the Treasury Department was forced to begin employing “extraordinary measures” in order to maintain the borrowing needed to keep paying soldiers, issuing Social Security checks and otherwise funding the government.

Those measures include premature redemption of Treasury bonds owned by federal employees’ retirement accounts, borrowing cash set aside to smooth exchange rate fluctuations and stopping contributions to some government pension funds.

Mr. Mnuchin’s letter is a warning that those sleight-of-the-balance-sheet efforts cannot last forever. When Treasury runs out of them, it will not have enough money coming in to pay its spending obligations. That would necessitate either sharp and immediate spending cuts, or a government default on some of its obligations — not paying workers, contractors, lenders or citizens it owes money to, basically.

Economists generally warn that such a default would at minimum destabilize the economy and raise future government borrowing costs. In a worst case, it could shock the economy into recession.

But efforts to raise the borrowing limit have been tied up with broader budget negotiations. Lawmakers in both parties want to set higher spending caps for military and domestic spending for the coming fiscal year, which begins in October. If no agreement can be reached, statutory, across-the-board spending cuts will slice through the government Jan. 1, as the strict, austere spending limits set by the Budget Control Act of 2011 come back into force.

Democrats have insisted that domestic spending increases equal the military spending increases demanded by President Trump. But some Republicans, led by the acting White House chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, are resisting that demand.

That dynamic has kept budget talks in a stalemate for weeks.

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