The total national debt of the United States hit $35 trillion on Monday, a milestone that comes as lawmakers grapple with how best to curb the country’s debt and deficits .
The Treasury Department updates the data on the national debt daily. The federal debt per citizen has now climbed to nearly $104,000.
Republicans and some centrist Democrats have sounded the alarm about the growing debt and deficits, with the debt first crossing the $1 trillion mark in 1981. House Budget Committee Chairman Jodey Arrington (R-TX) released a statement on Monday.
“Today, we grieve yet another dubious milestone in the fiscal decline of the most powerful and prosperous nation in history,” Arrington said. “President Reagan’s words 34 trillion dollars ago still hold true today.”
“We don’t have a trillion-dollar debt because we haven’t taxed enough. We have a trillion-dollar debt because we spend too much,” Reagan said at the time.
The Congressional Budget Office recently examined the federal debt, which is set to grow much more over the next decade. Debt held by the public, which is separate from the national debt in that it excludes intragovernmental holdings of federal debt, is predicted to rise from 99% of gross domestic product this year to 122% of GDP by 2034.
The federal budget deficit will also be nearly $2 trillion in fiscal 2024, the nonpartisan CBO estimated last month.
The Medicare trust fund will be exhausted in 2036, and the combined Social Security trust fund will become exhausted in 2035, the programs’ trustees projected in May.
Republicans and fiscal conservatives have knocked Democrats and the Biden administration for not doing enough to address the deficit and national debt. Democrats, in turn, have blamed GOP tax cuts for adding to deficits. Some lawmakers from both parties on Capitol Hill have been pushing to address the situation, given looming deadlines to act in the coming years.
Some politicians from both parties have proposed the formation of a fiscal commission, with former Rep. Mike Rogers, who is running for Senate in Michigan, recently telling the Washington Examiner in an interview that he wants to see the creation of “a true bipartisan commission” and implement whatever recommendations the panel has.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) endorsed forming a bipartisan panel to secure the country’s fiscal footing in his first remarks as House leader.
In January, the House Budget Committee voted to advance bipartisan legislation that would form a panel consisting of both Republican and Democratic lawmakers from both chambers of Congress, in addition to outside experts. The committee would work to produce a report and propose legislation that would stabilize the ratio of public debt to GDP to at or below 100% within 10 years.
But it is tough politically because many lawmakers don’t want to face perceptions that they want to cut Social Security and Medicare.
Republicans have long been the party of reining in deficits and the national debt, but the new GOP platform that was released ahead of the 2024 convention (and was last updated in 2016) didn’t include any mention of the federal government’s growing national debt and deficits.
The White House on Monday attacked former President Donald Trump's tenure, which saw a massive run-up in the debt, which was in big part due to the pandemic. A White House spokesman also said that President Joe Biden has worked to reduce the deficit and had a plan to lower it by raising taxes on the wealthy.
"While congressional Republicans want to blow up the debt again with $5 trillion in more Trump tax cuts — while making hardworking families pay the price by cutting Social Security, Medicare, and the Affordable Care Act — President Biden’s budget would lower the deficit by $3 trillion by making billionaires and the biggest corporations pay their fair share and cutting spending on special interests," spokesman Jeremy Edwards said.
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Maya MacGuineas, the president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, told the Washington Examiner on Monday that both candidates in this year’s election should have plans in place to address the fiscal situation and that the U.S. can’t keep adding trillions of dollars to the debt “if we want to remain an economically sound nation.”
“As we hit this dangerous reminder of our untenable fiscal situation, we are in the midst of a political campaign that is completely void of serious discussion about how to address it,” she said.
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