The national debt just crossed $39 trillion—almost doubling since Trump vowed to erase it
The United States national debt crossed $39 trillion for the first time Tuesday, arriving at the grim milestone less than five months after it first hit $38 trillion in late October—a pace of accumulation that budget watchdogs and academic economists are now calling, with unusual unanimity, “unsustainable.”
The milestone, confirmed in Wednesday’s Daily Treasury Statement, lands amid a politically charged moment: it comes roughly two weeks before the ten-year anniversary of President Trump’s 2016 campaign promise to eliminate the national debt within eight years. Instead, the gross national debt has roughly doubled since Trump first took office—it was $19.9 trillion in January 2017.
“Our moral duty to the taxpayer requires us to make our Government leaner and more accountable,” President Trump wrote in March 2017, as he issued an executive order directing OMB Director Mick Mulvaney to submit a comprehensive plan to reorganize Executive Branch departments and agencies in order to keep his promise to put in place common sense reforms to eliminate waste so that the Government better serves all Americans. “We’re going to do more with less,” Trump said at the time.
“As America soars past $39 trillion in debt, we must recognize this alarming rate of growth and the significant financial burden we are putting on the next generation,” Michael A. Peterson, CEO of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, told. “Borrowing trillion after trillion at this rapid pace with no plan in place is the definition of unsustainable.”
At the current rate of growth, the Peterson Foundation projects that the debt will hit $40 trillion before this fall’s elections—another trillion-dollar jump in roughly the same compressed timeframe. Michael Peterson called the figure “staggering.” The speed of accumulation has accelerated sharply: the debt added its latest trillion in what the foundation estimates is less than five months, a rate of fiscal expansion that has few modern precedents outside of wartime or acute financial crisis.
The milestone arrives as the Congressional Budget Office, in its February 2026 outlook, projected that the federal deficit will reach $1.9 trillion in fiscal year 2026 and swell to $3.1 trillion by 2036 under current law. Over that same decade, debt held by the public is projected to surge from 101% of GDP today to 120% of GDP by 2036, eclipsing the previous all-time record of 106% set just after World War II. The long-term picture is even bleaker: CBO’s extended baseline now shows debt rising to 175% of GDP over the next 30 years, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.
Perhaps the most alarming dimension of the crossing is what it costs just to carry the debt. Net interest payments on the national debt are projected to exceed $1 trillion in fiscal year 2026—nearly triple the $345 billion in interest the government paid in 2020, at the onset of the pandemic. In the first three months of the current fiscal year alone, net interest payments reached $270 billion, already surpassing the nation’s defense spending for the same period.
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