The recent milestone of U.S. national debt surpassing $40 trillion has ignited a sharp partisan battle on Capitol Hill, with congressional Republicans rushing to criticize Democratic economic policies as reckless, “unaffordable socialist spending” that has driven the nation’s borrowing crisis. But independent economists and policy analysts are pushing back against that narrative, arguing that decades of Republican-led policy decisions — from sweeping tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans to costly discretionary military interventions in the Middle East — are the primary drivers of the national debt’s rapid expansion over the past 25 years.
Central to this debate is the record of former President and current President Donald Trump, who campaigned repeatedly on a pledge to fully eliminate the national debt. Across his two terms in the White House, Trump has already overseen an $11.6 trillion surge in total national debt, a figure that outpaces the debt growth of any other modern U.S. president.
Dean Baker, a senior economist at the nonpartisan Center for Economic and Policy Research, framed the issue clearly in a commentary published Thursday. “I have never been a deficit hawk, and I’m not about to change my religious affiliation now,” Baker wrote. “But whatever we think of debt and deficits, there is one point that should be very clear: It has been run up almost entirely due to Republican tax cuts and their inept management of the economy.”
Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman echoed that assessment, noting that while the $40 trillion figure itself holds no inherent special economic meaning, it serves as a stark reminder of the fiscal irresponsibility of the Trump administration. Krugman pointed to unfunded tax cuts that disproportionately benefit the top 1% of earners, billions in unnecessary wasteful military spending — including costly redesigns of aircraft carriers undertaken solely because Trump disliked their original appearance — as key contributors to ballooning borrowing.
Krugman added that the nation’s deficit outlook would be far more stable today if not for the large, inequality-widening tax cuts rammed through by successive Republican presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump, both of which heavily favored high-income households.
Data from Bobby Kogan, senior director of federal budget policy at the Center for American Progress, backs up these claims. In a 2023 analysis, Kogan found that tax cuts passed under the Bush administration and during Trump’s first term accounted for 57% of the total growth in the U.S. debt-to-GDP ratio since 2001. When one-time emergency spending to address the 2008 Great Recession and the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic is excluded from calculations, that share jumps to more than 90% of all debt ratio growth over the period.
Just last summer, Trump signed into law yet another massive tax cut package that will deliver disproportionate benefits to wealthy households and large corporations, and is projected to add trillions of additional dollars to the national debt over the coming decade.
Former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich highlighted a further layer of inequity in the current system in his Thursday commentary. “From now on, whenever you hear someone fret about how huge, horrible, and out-of-control the national debt is, explain to them that it’s largely because of tax cuts to the wealthy – who are also the major recipients of interest on that debt,” Reich wrote.
The $40 trillion debt milestone was reached several months earlier than independent forecasters initially projected, a gap partially attributed to lost federal revenue from Trump’s trade tariffs that were later invalidated by federal courts.
Democratic lawmakers have joined economists in calling out Republican fiscal hypocrisy. “Before his second term is even over, Donald Trump is responsible for more than $10 trillion of this,” Representative Chris Deluzio of Pennsylvania wrote Thursday. “Just INTEREST on this debt is now sucking up more of our public money than even the military and Medicare. DC Republicans are leaving our kids a colossal mess to clean up.”