Gross National Debt Reaches $35 Trillion

The gross national debt of the United States reached $35 trillion last Friday, seven months after the previous milestone reached at the end of last year, according to the U.S. Treasury.

The following is a statement from Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget:

Here we are again: the United States Treasury confirmed today that we’ve officially added another trillion dollars to the gross national debt. If this sounds familiar, we only just reached $34 trillion at the very end of 2023. We passed $33 trillion three months before that and $32 trillion three months before that. The borrowing just keeps marching along, reckless and unyielding.

This news is incredibly sobering – and incredibly unsurprising for anyone who has been following our fiscal trajectory. Just last month the Congressional Budget Office warned Americans that debt held by the public is on its way to a new record share of the economy in three years. The deficit will be nearly $2 trillion this year and nearly $3 trillion in ten years.

Yet despite all the risks and warning signs, these alarm bells seem to be falling on deaf ears. The bipartisan, deficit-reducing Fiscal Responsibility Act of last year was an excellent start to reducing our deficit; what we need is serious talk about how to build on that first step. Instead we are hearing an awful lot about spending and tax cuts that would make the situation worse, not better. We should extend the FRA caps, we should find needed new revenues, and we should fix our dangerously close to insolvent Social Security and Medicare trust funds.

We are going to have to get serious about the debt, and soon.  Election years cannot be an exception for trying to prevent completely foreseeable dangers – and the debt is one of the major dangers we are facing.

Enough with the charade of fiscal platitudes followed by deficit-busting records. True fiscal responsibility cannot exist in a vacuum – if we want any hope of putting America back on course toward a sustainable and prosperous future, our leaders need to bridge rhetoric with action. Pay for your new spending; pay for your new or extended tax cuts; make deals, shake hands, pass budgets. In a word: govern.

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For more information, please contact Matt Klucher, Assistant Director for Media Relations, at klucher@crfb.org.