$40 Trillion and Counting: America’s Debt Crisis Hits Record Level Ahead of Schedule

America’s skyrocketing debt is ahead of schedule. The national debt reached $40,047,425,768,420.22 on Wednesday, the highest it’s ever been.

Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.), part of a very exclusive group of federal legislators with any semblance of concern for this trend, pointed out on social media, “The national debt crossed the $40 trillion mark, months ahead of schedule. Instead of paying for things as we go, Washington spends and spends.” Paul has repeatedly said the biggest threat Americans face is the national debt.

We hit the $40 trillion-mark less than five months after the debt crossed $39 trillion in March 2026, which followed the $38 trillion mark in October 2025. The debt has more than doubled since January 2017, when it was $19.95 trillion. The first and second Trump administrations are responsible for $11.6 trillion of the debt, the most debt accrued in raw dollars under any one president. During Joe Biden’s single term, the debt shot up $8.4 trillion. And coming in second is Barack Obama, with $9.32 trillion of debt piled on during his two terms. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects that, at this rate, we’ll reach somewhere between $56 and $64 trillion of debt by 2036. And to think, the debt was $400 billion in 1971 and just under $6 trillion at the turn of the century. We’ve added $34 trillion in 25 years.

Who’s to Blame?

Who — or what — is to blame for this recent acceleration?

Steve Thompson of The Washington Post says it’s those dastardly tariffs. The debt accumulation picked up speed, he writes, because of “billions of dollars in lost revenue from President Donald Trump’s invalidated tariffs.”

FOX Business attributes the careening debt to people getting old, sort of. “America’s national debt is growing rapidly due to surging interest costs, which are rising because of a larger debt burden and higher interest rates, as well as growth in federal spending on Social Security and Medicare amid the aging of the U.S. population,” writes Eric Revell.

Representative Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), another fiscal hawk in Congress, blamed, in part, Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill. He published on X a post by The Kobeissi Letter that said the cost of servicing the national debt has tripled since 2020. “The results of the Big Beautiful Bill are in,” Massie commented. He reminded followers that he lost his reelection because he voted against the policies that have brought us here.

Massie was among the few lawmakers who voted against Trump’s signature bill last year. And he did so because it was so expensive. At the time, conservative forecasts by the CBO projected the bill would increase the debt by at least $3.5 trillion and up to $5 trillion over the course of a decade. The White House, however, rebuked those forecasts. The administration said the CBO didn’t account for the tremendous growth the country would experience thanks to the polices of the Trump administration.

Who Suffers?

Unfortunately, the White House, thus far, has been wrong. There is no Golden Age. No average American can say that he’s honestly tired of winning. The tariffs, a good idea implemented wrongly and badly, have been a mess. Hiring is moderate at best. Attempts at any meaningful spending cuts have been slashed, while Congress keeps spending like there’s no tomorrow. In fact, thanks to this uptick in debt accrual, Congress will probably raise the debt ceiling ahead of schedule now.

And while the White House failed to deliver on its promise of massive growth, it did deliver a surprise no normal person asked for: war. As the Bipartisan Policy Center points out, we haven’t even gotten the receipt for the illegal and unprovoked war the president launched against Iran.

What does this mean for you? As Massie pointed out, this amounts to $4,000 in debt per every American. “A family of four owes $16,000 per year for nothing but interest on the debt!”

Michael A. Peterson, CEO of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, told FOX Business we can all expect to suffer the consequences of debt:

The more debt we take on, the more interest costs we have to bear, which now even exceed the cost of national defense. And every trillion we add to our debt contributes to higher interest rates and inflation, increasing the mortgages, car loans and credit card bills of all Americans. At the same time, debt harms economic growth, slowing wage increases while the cost of living continues to rise.

Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible ⁠Federal Budget, echoed Peterson’s assessment, emphasizing how it makes citizens and country alike vulnerable. MacGuineas:

Forty trillion dollars of debt doesn’t exist solely on the government’s ledgers; ​it is felt throughout the economy and finds its way to the pocketbooks of people one way or another. The more we borrow, the more we exacerbate inflation, squeeze out other priorities in the budget, and leave ourselves vulnerable to emergencies at home and turmoil abroad.

Hyperinflation Ahead?

And those are the more upbeat predictions. Financial advisor and stockbroker Peter Schiff told The New American earlier this year that the United States could very well take an Argentina-type turn for the worst. At its highest, annual inflation in Argentina hit more than 3,000 percent. “We’re finally going to have to pay the piper for decades of monetary and fiscal excesses,” said Schiff, who advises people to buy gold.

While the various cited reasons for the rising debt are correct, it all comes down to one simple explanation: The debt is enormous because the government spends too much. And the government spends too much because it is far too large and out of control. And it’s far too large and out of control because our precious-metals money system has been replaced with a fiat scheme that is nothing short of monetary sorcery, while the people have been squeezed dry through taxes seven ways from Sunday.

Schiff, who was mocked by mainstream economists and analysts when he correctly predicted the 2008 financial crisis, likes to point to one major event that led to our $40 trillion debt. It was when President Richard Nixon eliminated the gold-exchange standard in 1971. “On that night, Nixon declared that foreign holders of US Federal Reserve notes, popularly known as US dollars, could no longer be redeemed in gold,” Schiff explains in a YouTube video. Up until then, all American paper money could be redeemed in gold (by foreigners). “But when Nixon broke the promise to pay gold, the US effectively defaulted on Federal Reserve notes, turning US currency into Monopoly money,” says Schiff.

End the Fed

Schiff explains that money backed by precious metals keeps the fiat voodoo away. Real money “was honest money that kept Americans free by placing fiscal restraints on the federal government.” Schiff again:

The inability to create dollars without gold backing them up was a powerful check on the growth of government. It limited government’s ability to spend and more importantly, its ability to go into debt.

None of this could happen without the Federal Reserve, which has been monetizing the deficit. Between the creation of the Fed and the passing of the federal income tax, America has been degraded to the largest debtor nation in all the world. “In fact, the United States owes more money than all the other debtor nations of the world combined,” says Schiff.

The removal of the gold standard and the rising debt will eventually lead to the dethroning of the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency, a status that has kept the consequences of debt at bay for now. What happens then? Schiff:

We now stand on the precipice of an inflationary collapse that will make the stagflation of the 1970s look like the roaring ’20s by comparison. It was 55 years ago today that the US went off the gold standard. But soon, the world will go off the dollar standard. And for Americans, the economic and financial consequences will be even more devastating.