Together, Bomb #1 and Bomb #2 drastically widened our deficit and blew our debt out of the water. In the end, the national debt rose by roughly $7.8 trillion under Donald Trump the first time around, which is the third-largest increase of any president in history (and remember, the two guys above him, George W. Bush and Abraham Lincoln, were both funding wars). That equals around $23,500 for every single American.
Less than one year after the 2017 Republican tax bill passed, the U.S. Treasury Department reported that the federal budget deficit – the difference between government spending and tax revenue – increased by 17 percent (to $779 billion) from FY2017 to FY2018.
According to the nonpartisan think tank Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, “234 percent of the increase in deficits, or $264 billion, was due to legislation enacted by Congress. The largest portion was the tax law, estimated to cost $164 billion in FY2018, followed by the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2018 which was estimated to cost $68 billion in 2018.”
The next year, Treasury reported that the deficit had grown to $984 billion from FY2018 to FY2019, a 26 percent increase.
Then, of course, came COVID-19. In FY2020, the U.S. budget deficit tripled to a record $3.1 trillion. According to The Wall Street Journal, “As a share of economic output, the budget gap in fiscal year 2020 hit roughly 16.1 percent, the largest since 1945, when the country was financing massive military operations to help end World War II.”
In FY2021, the federal budget deficit totaled almost $2.8 trillion. This was roughly $360 billion less than the 2020 deficit, but still nearly triple the 2019 deficit. It was also the second largest as a percentage of GDP since 1945, only behind 2020. In FY2022, the federal budget deficit totaled around $1.4 trillion; the FY2023 deficit totaled nearly $1.7 trillion; and the FY2024 deficit totaled $1.8 trillion.
Meanwhile, right before the pandemic, our public national debt was $22.7 trillion. By September 2020, the Congressional Budget Office reported that, for the first time since World War II, our nation’s debt equaled the size of the entire American economy. (Spoiler Alert: That’s not good). By the end of that year, our national debt had increased to $26.9 trillion. (Tip: Think of the federal debt as the sum of our past deficits.)
At the end of 2021, our federal debt was $28.4 trillion and by the end of 2022, that number hit $30.9 trillion. By September 2023, the national debt had risen to 33.17 trillion and by August 2025, the total outstanding public debt of the United States had reached almost 37 trillion. That equals $107,000 for every single American and is more marketable government debt than all other advanced countries combined. Interest expenses for the debt are now $1 trillion every year. This is more than we spend on anything except Social Security.
And now, Republicans have done it again – and it’s even worse this time. On July 4, 2025, President Trump signed into law an expansive, almost 900-page policy bill with 309 provisions. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act (you may have thought this is just what Donald, the Republicans, and the press referred to the legislation as, but this is its literal name) provides for $4.5 trillion in tax cuts over the next decade – most with no expiration date – and $1.7 trillion in spending cuts, including a 12 percent cut to Medicaid. There is also $450 billion in new spending, including a 150 percent increase for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) over the next five years.