It’s a dangerously addictive habit that threatens to ruin our children’s lives and undermine America’s national security — and this week Congress finally acknowledged as much, though it’s unclear whether lawmakers have the courage to do anything substantive.
No, I’m not talking about TikTok. I’m talking about the $34.6 trillion national debt.
The Senate unanimously passed a resolution Wednesday calling the debt “a threat to the national security of the United States” and calling future budget deficits “unsustainable, irresponsible, and dangerous.”
“We have more than doubled our national debt in just ten years,” said Sen. Mike Braun (R–Ind.), who sponsored the resolution. “America is moving down a dangerous and unsustainable path of reckless spending, and the federal government has yet to take it seriously.”
Passage of a nonbinding resolution on the Senate floor is many steps away from actually addressing the federal government’s reliance on debt, but, as they say, acknowledging you have a problem is the first step to solving it.
And the approval of that resolution was timely. Later Wednesday, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released its latest long-term budget projections. The report shows that annual budget deficits are set to grow from a projected $1.6 trillion this year to $2.6 trillion in 2034, $4.4 trillion in 2044 and $7.3 trillion in 2054.
As a result of these growing budget deficits, the national debt will continue to accelerate upward. CBO projects that federal government debt will total $114 trillion by 2054. The debt is already roughly the size of the national economy and is expected to surpass an all-time high of 106.4% of gross domestic product ( GDP) by 2028. At the end of the thirty-year projection, it is estimated that the debt will reach 166% of GDP.
“Such a large and growing debt would have significant economic and financial consequences,” the CBO warns. “Among other effects, it would slow economic growth, increase interest payments to foreign holders of U.S. debt, increase the risk of a fiscal crisis, increase the likelihood of other adverse outcomes, and make the nation’s fiscal position more vulnerable to an increase . in interest rates.”
Rising interest rates are already having significant effects on the federal budget. This year, payments on existing debt will amount to about $870 billion, which is more than the Pentagon’s budget. Debt payments have increased 32% since 2023, thanks to higher interest rates and a larger amount of debt.
The new CBO report shows that debt payments will be one of the fastest-growing parts of the budget for the foreseeable future, along with the twin programs Social Security and Medicare. By 2051, interest payments will be the largest item in the federal budget.
If there’s a shred of good news in the CBO’s new projections, it’s that the situation looks slightly less dire than last year. This improvement is due to higher expected levels of immigration and stronger estimates of future economic growth, not something that policymakers in Washington have done. (If anything, they seem determined to prevent these improvements from happening, both by limiting immigration and regulating the economy more rigorously.)
We should also keep in mind the usual caveats: CBO does not take into account the possibility of recessions, natural disasters, wars, or other unpredictable events that could cause the federal government to borrow more heavily than current law allows. The last thirty years have included 9/11, the war on terror, the Great Recession, and the COVID-19 pandemic, so it seems quite likely that the next thirty years will include at least some deficit-increasing emergencies.
“There is no way to look at these eye-popping numbers without realizing that we need to make a change,” said Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, which advocates for reducing deficits, in a statement on the CBO report. “And yet we have legislators who promise what they won’t do: I won’t raise taxes, I won’t fix Social Security, I won’t pay for all the things I want to do. And so we continue down this dangerous path.”
In fact, on Thursday, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) he told reporters that he supports plans for a so-called “fiscal commission” — which could propose some solutions to Congress’ budget problems — but only if the agency could not recommend tax increases or cuts to entitlement programs.
This approach ensures that the federal government will have to continue to borrow heavily to make ends meet. Despite the Senate’s declaration that the national debt poses a national security risk and the CBO’s attempts to sound the alarm about the federal government’s fiscal trajectory, there is still a critical shortage of elected officials willing to take the problem seriously .