Trump Has Outpaced Obama’s Debt Record as the Largest Accumulated Burden by a U.S. President.
Before the upheaval of the COVID-19 epidemic, in 2020 the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) did not mark the $40 trillion threshold in its ten-year projections for the gross national debt, which had forecast a federal debt total of about $36 trillion by 2030. By 2022, the agency anticipated breaching $40 trillion sometime in 2030. A year later, the anticipated crossing moved to 2028, and by 2024 the projection shifted again to 2027. The most recent assessment, released in February 2026, estimated the current fiscal year would close at roughly $39.4 trillion. We have since surpassed the $40 trillion mark.
The last occasion on which the federal government ran a budget surplus was in fiscal year 2001. Since then, deficits have been the norm under successive Congresses and administrations. The previous record for the most debt accumulated belonged to President Barack Obama, whose two terms produced an inflation-adjusted increase of about $13.2 trillion in the national debt.
Already surpassing that benchmark, eighteen months into his second term, President Donald Trump has set a new record. When inflation is taken into account, Trump’s first term added approximately $9.8 trillion to the debt, and his second term has already added more than $3.5 trillion, lifting the total to around $13.3 trillion—making him the president who oversaw the greatest inflation-adjusted surge in the federal debt in U.S. history.
There is more to come. The CBO projects that by the end of 2028 the gross national debt will reach about $43.3 trillion, implying that by the end of Trump’s second term he will have overseen roughly $7.1 trillion more in nominal debt. The actual figure is likely to be higher still: the forecast was made before Trump began his conflict with Iran, a development that introduces substantial unforeseen spending.
Debt held by the public presently stands at roughly $32 trillion. Unlike gross national debt, this measure excludes intragovernmental debt—the amounts the Treasury owes to federal trust funds and other government accounts. Excluding those obligations, public debt remains about 100 percent of GDP.
It is important to note that the total debt accrued is not merely a presidential ledger. Presidents do not possess unilateral authority and do not begin with a clean slate. They must operate in concert with Congress, and they inherit entitlement programs, spending levels, and tax structures. They also face external events that may be beyond their control, such as recessions and pandemics.
Blaming presidents alone for debt is difficult when the dominant driver of spending growth is not discretionary spending but long-established entitlement programs that no president or Congress has shown the political courage to overhaul: Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, which together now comprise roughly half of the federal budget.
Trump neither created nor reformed our entitlement programs. Yet a number of his policy choices contributed to the acceleration of debt accumulation. The CBO estimates that the One Big Beautiful Bill Act of 2025 boosted projected deficits by about $4.7 trillion over 2026–2035. Some of these deficits were expected to be offset by consumers bearing the cost of Trump’s tariffs, but that offset diminished after the Supreme Court struck down many of them.
Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes Reason, compiles a wide range of government financial data in its annual Debtor Nation report. The largest expenditure category in the federal budget is Social Security, which accounted for about 23 percent of net outlays in 2025. Social Security has promised more benefits than it can finance. The middle quintile of income earners will receive roughly 50 percent more in benefits than they contributed over their lifetimes. This looming issue grows as the worker-to-beneficiary ratio falls, moving from a relatively stable 3.2 to 3.4 between 1974 and 2008 to 2.6 in 2025.
Defense spending was blamed the last time the gross national debt topped 100 percent of GDP. The most recent peak occurred in 1946, when the debt-to-GDP ratio reached about 119 percent due to World War II. In 1945, the military accounted for about 90 percent of all federal spending.
Even with ongoing wars abroad, defense has fallen from the top spot to merely another line item. Military outlays surpassed $900 billion in 2025, but the federal budget has expanded so much that defense now represents only about 13 percent of total outlays, with veterans’ benefits adding another 5 percent.
Decades of deficits have led to a reality in which interest payments on the debt constitute a larger share of net outlays than the military. (For context, the Department of Defense remains the nation’s largest single employer.)
The national debt imposes an unfair burden on future generations, wielding the state’s coercive power to compel those yet to be born to finance services enjoyed by the current generation. Beyond questions of fairness, the more immediate concern is the cost and sustainability of debt.
Americans have grown to regard deficits and rising debt as normal. Unlike earlier episodes of extraordinary borrowing, there is no clear plan to reverse course. Each new debt milestone arrives sooner than its predecessor.
