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I wasn’t expecting a miracle, but I had hoped President Donald Trump would make a dent in the national debt. He talked about it enough on the campaign trail.
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Now that the debt has hit $40 trillion, it’s clear Republicans didn’t just fail to fix the problem. They had full control of Washington and made it worse.
That number is hard to fathom, but it won’t stay abstract for long. Interest on the debt alone now tops $1 trillion a year, more than we spend on anything except Social Security. It leads to higher inflation, higher interest rates, higher taxes, all of which slow the economy down.
That’s not sustainable.
Unfortunately, our politicians aren’t willing to make the tough decisions necessary to put us on a safer fiscal course. They’re more concerned with the next election than with tackling the debt.
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In less than 10 years, the debt has doubled. That’s right – doubled.
About a third of the increase came from Trump’s and former President Joe Biden’s spending during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Biden spent much of his four years using COVID-19 as cover to push through his costly big-government agenda, including an illegal push to “forgive” $400 billion in student loan debt.
Biden deserves a lot of blame for driving inflation and the debt during his term. But the deficit spending didn’t stop when Trump returned to the White House.
Trump came into office making big promises about reducing the debt. He claimed that tariffs on our trading partners would help slash it. That hasn’t panned out.
One of the first things Trump did in his second term was create “DOGE,” the Department of Government Efficiency. That effort, led by Elon Musk, had the right intentions (cutting waste, streamlining the federal bureaucracy) but didn’t deliver the savings Trump or Musk envisioned.
The reality is that spending under Trump is just as unsustainable as it was under Biden, if not more. The war in Iran, with no clear end in sight, isn’t helping.
The monthly budget deficit topped $432 billion in July, the highest level in several years, according to the U.S. Treasury Department. So far, the deficit for this fiscal year is $1.8 trillion.
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After the debt crossed $40 trillion, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said that there’s a “good chance” the budget deficit has peaked under Trump, and that the administration is “laser focused” on getting spending under control.
But what’s going to change?
Medicare and Social Security are biggest drivers of national debt. Someone has to act.
Here’s the thing that no one wants to talk about: The country’s retirement trust funds are running out of money, and fast.
Medicare and Social Security are the biggest drivers of the debt, and the cost of keeping them afloat will escalate sharply in coming years. Jessica Riedl, a budget and tax fellow at the Brookings Institution, says the programs are hurtling toward a $157 trillion shortfall over the next three decades.
Yet no Republican or Democrat has the gumption to touch them.
And even though Americans say they are worried about the debt, most aren’t willing to support even modest cuts to retirement benefits.
“The $40 trillion debt is an inevitable result of our demands for endless tax cuts, benefit expansions, and defense investments, and our refusal to address escalating Social Security and Medicare shortfalls,” Riedl told me. “We can blame politicians, but very few voters will back up their deficit concerns with a willingness to personally accept new taxes or benefit reductions.”
Riedl is right. Fixing this requires putting everything on the table.
Republicans have the House, the Senate and the White House, and they’re letting the moment pass anyway. Nobody wants to be the politician who touches Medicare or Social Security. But refusing to touch them is going to sink us.
Is the country ready to do the hard work? I fear it isn’t.
Ingrid Jacques is a columnist at USA TODAY. Contact her at [email protected] or on X: @Ingrid_Jacques
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: US debt just hit $40 trillion. The GOP blew its shot to fix it. | Opinion
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Reporting by Ingrid Jacques, USA TODAY / USA TODAY
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This story was originally published August 23, 2026 at 1:01 AM.