Treasury: $1.5 Trillion Deficit in First 10 Months of Fiscal Year

The United States borrowed $1.5 trillion in the first ten months of fiscal year 2024, including $244 billion in July, according to the latest Monthly Treasury Statement from the Treasury Department.

In the past 12 months, the U.S. government borrowed $1.6 trillion – or $1.9 trillion excluding the effects of the overturned student debt cancellation. Read our analysis on this here.

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

America is sleep-borrowing $5 billion a day. Despite the number of warnings about our fiscal health, the message continues falling on deaf ears. Our elected officials have slept through so many alarm bells that we’ve racked up over $1.5 trillion in deficits this year, and the interest on our debt alone is more than we spend on national defense.

The fiscal outlook makes for grim reading – in just three years, within the next presidential term, our national debt will exceed an all-time record share of the economy. Yet despite the fact that whoever wins the White House in November will oversee this milestone, we’re hearing shockingly little in the way of plans to turn things around. What we have gotten is a taste of the many ways things can get worse, including promises to extend some or all of the expiring tax cuts without a plan to make up for that lost revenue as well as promises to not touch Social Security and Medicare as they run ever-closer toward insolvency and automatic benefit cuts.

It's easy to shrug off deadlines, to kick the can, to continue making a looming challenge a “tomorrow problem.” But the longer we put off the necessary changes to our fiscal path, the sharper and steeper the fixes will need to be, and the less time we will have – if any – to make a correction. Instead, our elected officials and candidates for public office should start taking America’s finances seriously, learning from past mistakes and being better stewards of our fiscal health.

Our leaders should stop hitting snooze on their alarms, before it’s too late.

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