US Debt Tops $40 Trillion, Doubling Since 2017

The White House blamed the previous administration. "President Trump pledged to clean up Joe Biden's fiscal mismanagement," White House spokesman Kush Desai said in a statement to NPR. "That's why the Trump administration has been focused on slashing waste, fraud, and abuse in federal spending while accelerating economic growth to get America's debt-to-GDP ratio trending in the right direction again."

Budget watchdogs were blunter. "Our current fiscal trajectory is plainly unsustainable, and that's the best-case scenario," said Margaret Spellings, president of the Bipartisan Policy Center. "Even in the rosiest scenarios, we're speeding toward a cliff and refusing to turn the wheel."

"$40 trillion should be a wake up call. But neither Congress nor the president have a credible plan to stop it from growing," said Carolyn Bourdeaux, executive director of Concord Action, which advocates for fiscal responsibility.

Michael Peterson, CEO of the nonpartisan Peter G. Peterson Foundation, told CBS News the problem is bipartisan and long-running: "We've been running deficits for the last 26 years, and we've basically ignored a lot of the structural challenges that exist in our budget that are very well known." He added that "many administrations and many Congresses have taken steps in the wrong direction."

Not everyone is alarmed. Dean Baker, co-founder of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, told CBS News "we're going the wrong way" and pointed to rising military spending, but said tariffs and the Iran war's effect on prices are more immediate threats than the debt itself.