It took 200 years for national debt to hit $1 trillion. Annual interest alone now exceeds that—a ‘crushing legacy we must reverse,’ says budget chair

The U.S.’s eye-watering debt burden poses an “existential threat to the future of our nation,” the chairman of the House Budget Committee has warned, as the country’s borrowing figure tipped over $39 trillion. Texan Republican Jodey Arrington highlighted last week that it had taken the U.S. nearly two centuries to build a debt pile worth $1 trillion, whereas a mere matter of decades later, the Treasury is forking out that figure every year merely in service payments on the debt.For the fiscal year 2025, the Treasury paid $1.22 trillion in interest on the debt, and for FY2026, the government has already paid out $520 billion. By 2036, that figure is expected to hit to $2.1 trillion annually, according to calculations by the Congressional Budget Office.

Indeed, U.S. debt didn’t reach the $1 trillion mark until the early 1980s, hitting $1.1 trillion under President Ronald Reagan.

As Arrington points out: “It took roughly 200 years to accumulate the first $1 trillion. Now we add that in a matter of months. Every child in America today carries a $530,000 share of this debt—a crushing legacy we must reverse. Compounding the problem, we now spend more than $1 trillion a year just on interest to service our debt—more than the entire defense budget and triple the amount when........

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