Together, Bomb #1 and Bomb #2 drastically widened our deficit and blew our debt out of the water.
In the end, President Trump approved legislation and executive actions during his first term that added an estimated $8.4 trillion to the debt over ten years. That equals around $25,400 for every single American. Then came President Joe Biden’s $4.7 trillion.
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.
A study by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a nonprofit think tank that advocates for a lower federal budget deficit, found that “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 in both FY2024 and FY2025, the deficit hovered around $1.8 trillion.
Meanwhile, right before the pandemic, our gross federal debt was $22.7 trillion (tip: think of the federal debt as the accumulation of our past deficits.) By September 2020, the Congressional Budget Office said that debt held by the public was projected to reach 98 percent of GDP, its highest level since shortly after World War II. (Spoiler Alert: That’s not good). By the end of that year, our national debt had increased to $26.9 trillion.
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 the end of the year, December 2025, it was approaching $39 trillion. That equals $112,000 for every single American. Interest expenses for the debt are now over $1 trillion every year.
And now, the 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 reduces federal revenues by about $4.5 trillion over the next decade while reducing direct spending by about $1.1 trillion, including roughly $887 billion in savings from changes to Medicaid. At the same time, the law provides around $350 billion in additional funding for defense, homeland security, and immigration enforcement, including substantial new funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).