RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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The U.S. Treasury building in Washington, D.C., on June 17, 2025. —Al Drago—Bloomberg/Getty Images
The U.S.’s national debt surpassed $40 trillion for the first time ever this week—more than double what it was a decade ago.
The record-breaking figure comes after the government reported in March that the total debt reached $39 trillion, meaning that the debt grew by $1 trillion in less than half a year. Just a few months before that, in October, that figure was $38 trillion.
And the country has reached the $40 trillion milestone earlier than experts had previously predicted; in 2023, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the total debt wouldn’t hit that figure until 2028.
The debt has been increasing for decades, but much of the current total has been accumulated over the past ten years, during the administrations of President Donald Trump and former President Joe Biden. Here’s how much the debt grew under each of their terms in the White House.
Trump’s first term
When Trump took office for his first term in January 2017, the total debt was about $19.95 trillion. When his presidency ended four years later, the debt stood at roughly $27.75 trillion, meaning that the debt rose by about $7.8 trillion under his Administration.
Biden’s term
The debt grew by about $8.4 trillion while Biden was in the White House, increasing from about $27.75 trillion when he was sworn into office in January 2021 to roughly $36 trillion by the time he finished his term in January 2025.
Trump’s second term so far
Since Trump returned to the White House for a second term in January last year, the debt has gone up by about $3.8 trillion. That means that the national debt has climbed by a total of $11.6 trillion across the two Trump Administrations—so far—a figure that comprises more than a quarter of the total amount.
Why has the debt soared?
Experts credit a significant portion of the growth in the national debt to the federal government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. According to Reuters , about one-third of the growth seen since 2017 took place during two years or so of the pandemic, when the first Trump Administration and then the Biden Administration intensified borrowing to fund the country’s pandemic response and recovery.
Both Trump’s and Biden’s fiscal policies have also contributed to—and exacerbated—the longer-standing issue of government spending exceeding tax and other revenues, which has led to the ballooning national debt.
For instance, according to the Brookings Institute , the tax cuts that Trump signed into law during his first year in office in 2017 were expected to contribute almost $2 trillion to the deficit by 2028. And in March , the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget predicted that Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill,” a signature piece of his second-term agenda that also included steep tax cuts, will add $4.7 trillion to the national debt through 2035.
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