The U.S. National Debt Was Concerning Before It Was $40 Trillion (August 22nd, 2026)

I was going to write a different sort of blog this week. Rather than writing about something directly work related, I was going to write about the first week of my trip in China. I am sure I’d still bring some reflections on work back into the writing, but a lot more sharing about the culture and experiences I am having on the other side of the world from where I normally am. But a set of news stories came a couple days ago that made me feel I had to write about it.

I have tried keeping a healthy media diet and tried to be especially careful while over here (my food diet has not been kept as closely in check as I have been eating tons of yummy food). But about once a day I’ll check The Hill and The Guardian to see what is going on in the United States and, to some extent, the rest of the world. We are living in unstable times where a week in the news cycle often has many noteworthy stories, but I did not have the feeling with many of the things I have seen going on that my insight at this time would add much value.

I have been focused on the national debt for many years now, so when I saw the news story that it officially eclipsed $40 trillion, my immediate thought was of course it did. I didn’t think it was worth me writing about because it was an inevitability. Our national debt has been on an exponential growth curve for a long time. We are just living in a moment in space-time where the U.S. National Debt hit a certain number. That statement is true in all times. The issue is not the number but the trend.

Let’s look at the last 25 years of the national debt, according to fiscaldata.treasury.gov, on the last day of the federal fiscal year (September 30th).

• 2001: ~$5.81 trillion

• 2002: ~$6.23 trillion

• 2003: ~$6.78 trillion

• 2004: ~$7.38 trillion

• 2005: ~$7.93 trillion

• 2006: ~$8.51 trillion

• 2007: ~$9.01 trillion

• 2008: ~$10.02 trillion

• 2009: ~$11.91 trillion

• 2010: ~$13.56 trillion

• 2011: ~$14.79 trillion

• 2012: ~$16.07 trillion

• 2013: ~$16.74 trillion

• 2014: ~$17.82 trillion

• 2015: ~$18.15 trillion

• 2016: ~$19.57 trillion

• 2017: ~$20.24 trillion

• 2018: ~$21.52 trillion

• 2019: ~$22.72 trillion

• 2020: ~$26.95 trillion

• 2021: ~$28.43 trillion

• 2022: ~$30.93 trillion

• 2023: ~$33.17 trillion

• 2024: ~$35.46 trillion

• 2025: ~$37.64 trillion

Now, with still over a month to go in this federal fiscal year, we have reached the $40 trillion mark. Currently, according to usdebtclock.org, we are already $57 billion beyond that point and we will see where it is come the end of this fiscal year. War is a major contributor to national debt, so the current conflicts we find ourselves in will push this number up substantially. We eclipsed the $40 trillion figure on August 18th and I am writing this on August 22nd, so in about a half a week our debt has climbed more than 1/20th of a trillion dollars. I am not saying that this exact rate will continue, but I am confident the current general trend will.

That is not just a statement about this administration. That is not just a statement about the party that is currently in power. That is a statement of the trend of this millennium without any real solutions to solving the debt. The reason that I started with the year 2001 is not just because it was the beginning of the millennia, or because it provides the chart I am about to illustrate exactly 25 data points, but because it comes off the last time the U.S. had a balanced budget. From 1998-2001, according to taxpolicycenter.org, the U.S. had a surplus. As the article points out, there are too many factors to completely attribute this success to the Clinton Administration or the Congress at the time. The end of the Cold War brought defense savings, stock market and tax revenue booms ahead of the internet bubble bursting brought savings as well, but from 2001 on we have failed, as a country, to produce a balanced budget.

What I most want to visualize in this chart is the trend rates. Forget about the numbers for a second, and just look at the slope of the curve. From 2001 to 2007, the general slope was at a relatively consistent slight incline, and from 2021 to 2025, the general slope was at a relatively consistent and much sharper incline. This is the shape of an exponential curve. So what really bothered me while reading the news reports was not that we hit $40 trillion, as that was a near certainty given the trend and inability for our government to do anything to truly address the problem at hand, but the shock by some of our elected officials that we had reached this point and the insincere solutions posed by others in response to the news. We need to have adult conversations about this very serious issue if we are going to do something about it.

The Trump Administration claims that it inherited an abysmal economy from the Biden Administration. Well if that’s true, then the Biden Administration has every right to have said the same thing about the Trump Administration. We need to stop pointing fingers at each other and work together to actually try and solve the issue. It threatens all of us and it threatens future generations who will not care about what political party or specific politicians are to blame, they will just care whether or not we were able to adequately protect and serve them.

If the national debt reaching $40 trillion truly caught any of our politicians off guard, that in and of itself is a problem. If our politicians believe that we must double down on the current efforts that have only accelerated the trend at which our debt is growing, that in and of itself is a problem. If our politicians are using this moment to point fingers at the other side, which both parties are, that in and of itself is a problem. We don’t need more politics right now, we need more actual solutions. Not just to the debt problems, but to the myriad problems that created the debt crisis and have left the debt crisis unaddressed for so long.

When dealing with exponential curves like this one, the instinct is to try to reduce the debt crisis at once, but because the figure is indicative of broader factors, we must work to address what is contributing to the debt sustainably, which cannot be an immediate process. The poor health and wellbeing across physical, psychological, social, emotional, cultural, moral, spiritual, and financial dimensions cannot be fixed with a bandaid. It is that exact mentality, and the false promises politicians have made and our electorate has accepted for too long that they would be able to do so, that has contributed to the problem in the first place. We must look to curb the many trends that contribute to our debt - poor health, outdated systems, unnecessary military spending, inaccessibility for many to quality jobs, tax breaks for the wealthiest that have never trickled down to fertilize the soil of America’s economy, and many more - which will take time, but will be worthwhile not just for ourselves, but for future generations as well.

It is unreasonable to expect that problems that have been built over generations will be fixed in a day, or a month, or a year. We need to create generational strategies to address generational failures. Look at the chart between 2009 and 2015. Following The Great Recession, the rate at which our debt was growing increased drastically. While the debt never reduced, the rate at which the climb that we saw from 2008 to 2012 started to slow from 2013 to 2016. I believe that we can do much better than what we did at that time, but that general theme, of slowing the rate at which trends are rising so that we can sustainably reduce the debt is what we must work toward. We can see a similar trend in the emergency response to the COVID pandemic with a sharp rise in the rate of debt growth, though we have not really seen a reduction in the rate of growth beyond the initial shock like we did following The Great Recession. Times like these are necessary to have increased spending to address crises that arise and should be treated differently than chronic structural deficit spending, though still scrutinized. I believe that there is much to be learned from the responses to both crises, and I won’t get into all of that in this piece, but what is inarguable is that rising general debt burdens weakens our ability to address future crises that emerge. We must act with urgency to address the budget crisis, be aware of what contributed to it, and be realistic in what the road to recovery looks like.

The Full Press was directly created as an honest attempt to address this crisis. When I first started working on Full Capital, our debt was in the mid-to-upper $20 trillion range. I can tell you that is sure felt like a crisis back then too. In the six years since the idea was first born, the debt has increased by about half of what it was at that time. I have tried, and will continue to try, discussing what real solutions look like. I have met with legislators and their staff at the federal, state, and local level to discuss what I believe must happen to address this crisis.

The debt does compound on itself, which is a major factor in why we should have addressed it earlier and why we need to address it as soon as possible. The interest on our debt has ballooned to be over $1 trillion by itself, and will continue to rise the more and longer our debt continues to grow. But our lack of wellbeing, individually and as a society, as discussed earlier, also plays a major role in the exponential rates at which the debt is rising. This is why DOGE was an insincere effort to actually address spending. As I have said before, the concept of cutting social services to increase prosperity is the same philosophy as shoving cash under the mattress as a wealth building strategy. Capital cannot compound, and if you do this when you are as far in debt as we were and are, you only ensure greater debt. That does not mean that we didn’t need to transform our social service systems, we absolutely did, but we need a real solution to address the crises we face, not just cruelty in an effort to benefit a wealthy few.

I have written about this before, but one of the major issues that we must resolve federally is the way we calculate and project costs and savings. There are paradigmatic flaws within the operating system of our government - from generally cost scoring policies in a five to ten year window (which flies directly in the face of my assertion that we must address problems that arise over generations with solutions that unfold over generations), to the incentives for elected officials to prefer short-term patchwork to long-term solutions, to a culture that prefers simple talking points instead of complex policies - we must be willing to look at new solutions.

I will try to stay away from the moral argument for this work and stick to economics, not because the moral argument is unimportant, but because we are talking about debt and I think the economic argument stands strongly on its own. I am not trying to be crass, but communicate what I am trying to do in the context of the debt crisis in the news as best I can. Building a social infrastructure that prioritizes prevention of harm and promotion of wellbeing creates a lasting asset that returns on itself for many generations, which is what PressOn is doing, and why Full Capital and PressOn come together in a comprehensive agenda. There are two sides to any budget equation, revenues and expenses.

On the revenue side, we have seen the benefits of trauma-informed work environments through better employee retention, greater care with work, and greater innovation that leads to better returns. As we scale this work at a societal level, we would expect to see major benefits with stronger workforce participation, which not only promotes stronger tax revenue, but also reduces reliance on unemployment systems over time, which will be seen in the expense category. Additional benefits on the revenue side likely include but are not limited to business innovations, and as this paradigm is expanded beyond just domestic policy, improved relations with other countries, from improved trade relationships to reductions in unnecessary wars.

On the expense side, our systems are overwhelmed by the poor outcomes we experience. While the scarcity of care that is available has roots in Reagan-era policies around reducing the numbers of doctors in practice, and the orientation of care toward treatment as medicine has been commercialized and our social fabric has frayed from the original protections that used to be built into it, we have a culture and system that allows problems to remain unaddressed until they become so large that they must be dealt with, which perpetuates the treatment-first mentality I write about often and will continue to fight against. As need has only continued to grow, this has created bottlenecks within our systems, further perpetuating this treatment-first mentality as systems are too overwhelmed by current needs to protect for the future, which has created a vicious cycle that has not only prioritized treatment, but also exacerbated inequities built into the system with who even has access to care in the first place.

A simple truth is that we cannot just treat our ways out of the problems we face today. We pay massive amounts for both the high costs of treatment today and the growing need that ensures that we will rely on even more treatment tomorrow. By prioritizing prevention we will see less need for treatment, so while there is some additional costs it will likely also be offset by the reductions in other (and much more costly) costs. Don’t get me wrong, we must strengthen and bolster treatment and intervention systems, but we must prioritize prevention so that we can avoid these costs in the first place and increase revenues to further offset our debts.

There are other policies that can be implemented along The Full Press to further support genuine solutions to our debt crisis. Means testing certain benefits will allow us to create greater efficiencies in government services without harming the people our government is organized to serve. Taxing people who borrow off their equity similar to an income tax, which is a massive loophole the wealthiest Americans exploit to not pay their fair share (and sometimes any taxes) would bring in tremendous new revenue among other social benefits. Eliminating the subsidies that prop up industries that lead to worsening health outcomes proposes solutions on both the revenue and expense side of our budgets. There are many other such policies, but I am just trying to illustrate that The Full Press can become the foundation of a platform that does much more than it currently describes if given the chance.

Some people will say that there is not enough proof in The Full Press to invest in it yet. I disagree for the most part, as outlined in my capstone, the research on both Full Capital and PressOn are strong to support the concept behind the agenda. I agree at some other level that we have not yet implemented The Full Press and so cannot know for sure that it will work. But what I am certain we can agree on is that what we are currently doing and have been trying over the last generation of our politics is certainly not working. At least, as I mentioned earlier, even if we don’t see the financial returns from The Full Press, which I highly doubt will be the case but is not an impossibility, the lasting social assets and community fabric will persist.

The commentary from current politicians has been infuriating. Our Vice President gave a vague response that there is a discreet plan to grow our way out of the crisis we face. We are in a time of unprecedented growth in the American economy and continue to see the debt crisis remain unaddressed. Continuing to grow the economy is not going to all of a sudden start paying dividends toward the debt, at least not without structural reform that ensures that the wealth created is not just harvested by individuals and not returned to the broader society.

Another politician shared that the United States must balance its budget the way that a family must. This at least I think was meant with sincerity, but is also a flawed way to look at it. The United States must operate like a business. We can see right now with how large companies operate that they strategically leverage deficits to plan for the future. Amazon famously told shareholders they would not see a return for a very long time, but described the vision and was invested in for how it would become as large as it has. This runs counter to normal quarterly dividends that creates short-term thinking and investments in private markets.

Debt can be a powerful tool in wealth creation or a powerful driver in ruin. The problem with our debt is not inherently that it exists, though a debt burden of its current size is indefensible in my opinion, but that it has been built without strategy. It is the accumulation of poor policies and decisions that have resulted in a lack of wellbeing that has further perpetuated its growth. Politicians have weaponized the debt to not do things they don’t want to do while completely ignoring its existence when the political will exists. Because of the private interests that drive our politics currently, this political will is often not aligned with actually promoting prosperity.

The Full Press is worth a shot. I have seen no better ideas, and I know with a fuller team and resources to implement at scale, we would see tremendous benefits. I believe that these benefits would include a generational work down of our national debt, and with responsible policy that evolves through implementation over time I trust that we can get there. The greatest benefit would come as generations continue when children born into healthier systems have children of their own, at which point we would see a different kind of exponential curve. Rather than into further debt, it would instead be toward greater prosperity. But we need to stop believing there is a quick fix to this. We need to move beyond the horrific politics and policies that result that have created this crisis in the first place. The consequences of not doing so are devastating for all of us, so I believe that we can and will work together to address it.

We must not dumb down the problem as though it just suddenly emerged. It is a flaw in our operations that has persisted for far too long through willful action and inaction because of who benefits from what is prioritized. But if we actually believe that the debt threatens all of us, the wealthiest and the poorest of us, then we should change our actions. The alarm bells are ringing and they have been ringing for a while. We are still strong enough to fight, so we must.

I believe that we will. I don’t know what my role will be in it, but I will continue to champion real solutions, participate in honest debates aimed at making our country and world stronger, and integrate lessons learned through the process of implementing real solutions. We should all, especially public leaders and servants, commit to the same thing. We have a shared destiny here, so finger pointing does not do any good. None of us knows the exact answers, because we have not done it yet, and The Full Press creates learning loops for us to learn what is and is not working, and improve the process from there. There will be bumps in the road, and it will take time, but there will be nothing more worthwhile than getting back on a good course. The benefits will be massive for us, and it will be everything for our children and future generations.