When Democratic President Bill Clinton left office on January 20, 2021, the United States had a balanced federal budget and a surplus. But the federal deficit grew substantially under Clinton’s successor, George W. Bush, and continued under the three presidents who followed: Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Joe Biden.
The U.S. lived through some major crises in the 21st Century — the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the Great Recession, the COVID-19 pandemic — and Congress did a lot of spending in response to them.
In his March 18 column for the Washington Post, Never Trump conservative George Will examines the size of the United States’ federal debt. And he warns that the enormity of the debt will make the U.S. less equipped to handle its next economic crisis.
“The Peterson Foundation says that on or about March 18, the national debt will reach $39 trillion,” Will explains. “This was less than five months after it reached $38 trillion. At our current pace of profligacy — it probably will accelerate — three trillion-dollar milestones can be passed during one fiscal year. The Congressional Budget Office projects that in 10 years, the nation will annually be spending more than $2 trillion (two thousand billion) just on debt service, which already is the fastest-growing part of the budget. The national debt will exceed $40 trillion by the end of October, the Peterson Foundation projects.”
The conservative columnist continues, “The debt has doubled in the 10 years since Donald Trump, on March 31, 2016, vowed to eliminate the debt in eight years. He did not try, but if he had, he would have been stymied by this grinding political dynamic: The fastest-growing age cohort is people 65 and older. … Last year, the president’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act increased the standard tax deduction for seniors — and only for them.”
Citing data from the conservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI), Will notes that during a 50-year period, 1975-2025, the “average of annual budget deficits as a percentage of GDP has been 3.8 percent” — but the deficit “surpassed” that number in 2023, 2024 and 2025.
“The higher the national debt as a percentage of GDP (gross domestic product),” Will warns, “the less leeway government has to respond to recessions or other economic shocks. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget says the government entered the last two recessions with the national debt at 35 percent and 80 percent of GDP, respectively. Today, it is 100 percent.”