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The U.S. national debt hit the $40 trillion threshold, and about one-fourth of that debt has been incurred while President Donald Trump has been in office.
Spending by the federal government has accelerated dramatically as the U.S. population has aged, with increased enrollment in Social Security and Medicare pushing spending on those entitlement programs higher and contributing to the growth in federal budget deficits.
The recent rise in interest rates — coupled with the larger national debt — has exacerbated that trend, with interest expenses from servicing the national debt now topping $1 trillion per year.
While presidents and congressional majorities of both parties bear responsibility for the growth in the national debt, President Donald Trump’s first term and the opening half of his second term have seen the debt grow by more than $11.5 trillion combined to date, according to Treasury Department data.
White House spokesman Kush Desai noted Trump’s predecessor in a statement to FOX Business: “Cleaning up Joe Biden’s reckless fiscal mismanagement has been a top priority for the Trump administration, from slashing waste, fraud, and abuse in government spending to accelerating economic growth and getting America’s debt-to-GDP ratio back on the right track.”
US NATIONAL DEBT SURPASSES SIZE OF THE ECONOMY FOR FIRST TIME SINCE WORLD WAR II
The overarching measure of the U.S. national debt used by entities like the Treasury and the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office is known as the gross national debt, which is nearing $40 trillion.
The figure includes all the U.S. government’s debt, including the obligations held in intragovernmental accounts like the Social Security trust funds. Those debt obligations are excluded in a separate metric known as the debt held by the public, which is currently over $32 trillion.
When Trump’s first term began on Jan. 20, 2017, the gross national debt totaled $19.9 trillion. A variety of tax and spending policies in the first Trump term contributed to the growth in the debt, including the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act as well as massive spending on COVID-19 relief measures.
A White House official noted how the country was facing a historic pandemic during that first term, arguing the crisis accounted for a larger share of the debt growth during that period. The official added that Biden “then recklessly spent trillions on COVID stimulus spending” and pointed to how “Obama economists like Larry Summers correctly warned would only ratchet up inflation, which caused interest rates to rise and just worsen the government’s borrowing costs.”
FEDERAL BUDGET DEFICIT ON TRACK TO SURPASS $2T THIS FISCAL YEAR AS SPENDING OUTPACES REVENUE
The largest U.S. budget deficit in history was incurred in fiscal year 2020 — the last full fiscal year of Trump’s first term — when the federal government ran a more than $3.1 trillion deficit.
That year saw several bipartisan COVID relief measures enacted by Congress and the president to help individuals and businesses, as well as state and local governments, as they dealt with the economic toll of the pandemic.
At the end of Trump’s first term, the gross national debt grew by over $7.8 trillion and stood at over $27.7 trillion as of Jan. 20, 2021, when Biden’s term began. Over the next four years, the gross national debt grew by more than $8.4 trillion as additional COVID relief measures were enacted, and Democratic majorities advanced Biden’s American Rescue Plan Act.
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When Trump’s second term began, Treasury Department data showed the gross national debt totaled $36.2 trillion as of Jan. 21, 2025, the day after his second inauguration.
The most recent data shows that as of Aug. 14, 2026, the gross national debt had risen to more than $39.9 trillion — an increase of over $3.7 trillion in the second Trump term to date. Higher spending on entitlement programs and debt interest, as well as tax cuts that were enacted under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act and tariff refunds, contributed to the higher debt.
Taken together, the more than $7.8 trillion in debt from the first Trump term and the $3.7 trillion in debt incurred to date in the president’s second term combine to total about $11.5 trillion in debt during his time in office.
