The federal debt has now passed $36 trillion. That number is so large it has become decorative, the kind of figure politicians cite on the way to voting for the next appropriation. Nobody in Washington is embarrassed by it. That absence of embarrassment is the real problem.
A government that cannot be embarrassed by its own accounts is a government that has lost the plot. Spending is not governing. Spending is the easiest thing an official can do, because the costs arrive later and the benefits arrive at the ribbon-cutting. The discipline of restraint asks officials to forgo the ribbon-cutting entirely, and very few of them are willing to do that. So they don’t, and the bill compounds.
There is a school of thought, quieter now than it once was, that holds thrift to be a governing virtue rather than a personal quirk. Its practitioners believed that the prosperity of a republic depends on the government leaving productive resources in the hands of the people who earned them, not because government is incompetent in principle, but because it is systematically biased toward action. Every bureau has an instinct for self-preservation. Every appropriation creates a constituency. The machinery of the state expands by default, not by conspiracy, and the only check on that expansion is a leadership willing to say no when yes is the easier word. That tradition has not died, but it has been thinned considerably by decades of bipartisan agreement that deficits are someone else’s problem.
The present diagnosis is not ideological. It is arithmetic. The Congressional Budget Office projects that the federal government will spend roughly $7 trillion in fiscal year 2025 against revenues of approximately $5 trillion, producing a deficit somewhere in the neighborhood of $1.8 trillion. Interest payments on the existing debt are now running above $1 trillion annually, which makes debt service one of the largest single items in the federal budget, larger than the defense budget in some projections, larger than Medicaid. The government is, in plain terms, borrowing money to pay the interest on money it has already borrowed. This is not a policy position. It is a description of a household that has stopped reading its own mail.
The named enemy here is not any party. Both parties have contributed to this condition with admirable consistency. The enemy is the operating assumption, shared across Washington, that the appropriate response to any problem is a federal program, and that the appropriate response to any federal program is to expand it. This assumption is self-reinforcing because programs create dependents, and dependents vote, and politicians who wish to continue being politicians find it inadvisable to reduce the rolls. The result is a federal government that now touches nearly every area of American life and does most of them tolerably at best, expensively at worst, and irreversibly in almost every case.
The prescriptions are not exotic. The first is a return to the practice of actually passing budgets, not continuing resolutions that freeze the existing baseline and make every debate a hostage negotiation. A budget forces choices. A continuing resolution defers them. Washington has come to prefer deferral so consistently that the continuing resolution is now the normal operating condition of the federal government, which means no one has to be accountable for a number they never voted on.
The second prescription is spending caps with teeth. The Budget Control Act of 2011 briefly imposed such caps, and the deficit shrank while they held. Then Congress waived them, because caps are inconvenient. Any future caps must be embedded in a process that makes waiving them costly enough that the majority will think twice. This is not a technical problem. It is a political will problem, and political will is manufactured by making the comfortable option painful enough to require justification.
The third prescription is a frank reassessment of which functions properly belong to the federal government and which have drifted upward through decades of grant programs and categorical aid that effectively made the states into administrative arms of Washington while leaving them nominally independent. The federal government has accumulated obligations it was never designed to carry. Some of those obligations should be returned to states, localities, and private institutions that are closer to the people they serve and more directly accountable to them. This is not abandonment. It is constitutional accuracy.
The fourth prescription is the simplest and the least popular: stop pretending that growth will solve this without restraint. Economic growth is welcome and useful and insufficient. The CBO’s baseline projections already assume healthy economic growth, and the deficits persist anyway, because spending grows faster than the economy has ever consistently grown. The idea that the country will simply outgrow a debt that accumulates faster than the economy expands is not optimism. It is a postponement dressed up as a forecast.
The tradition of restraint has always understood that the case for thrift is hardest to make when times are good and hardest to ignore when times are bad. The United States has run deficits in good years and bad years, in wartime and in peace, under Republicans and Democrats, under low interest rates and under high ones. The one condition under which the deficit reliably shrank was when a leadership decided, as a matter of character rather than crisis, that borrowing from the future was unseemly.
Unseemly is an old word. Washington could use it back.
Plymouth Notch is a columnist for The Republic Standard writing on fiscal restraint, federal spending, and the discipline of limited government.