US Agency Debt Since 1945

Agency debt (primarily debt from agencies and government-sponsored enterprises like the Federal National Mortgage Association that securitize home mortgage debt) started the immediate post World War II era at with a level of debt less than 0.5 percent of GDP and didn’t hit 1 percent of GDP till 1957.

But then agency debt began an exponential rise, with debt hitting 2 percent of GDP in 1965, blowing past 5 percent of GDP in 1973, reaching 10 percent of GDP in 1981.

Agency debt blew past 20 percent of GDP in 1988, exceeded 30 percent of GDP in 1995, and hit 40 percent of GDP in 1999, and agency debt peaked at 52 percent of GDP in 2003 at the end of the 2000-02 recession.

In the 2000s expansion agency debt declined to 46.7 percent of GDP by 2006, but then blew off in the Crash of 2008, peaking at 56.1 percent of GDP in the Great Recession year of 2009.

After the Crash of 2008 agency debt decreased rapidly to 46.6 percent of GDP by 2012 and then began a more gradual decline to 45.5 percent of GDP by 2014.

In response to the COVID crisis of 2020 agency debt increased to 48 percent of GDP in 2020.

On January 14, 2026, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) published its annual report on National Health Expenditures and its NHE Tables includes data on Medicaid from 1960 to 2023. On January 15, 2026, usgovernmentspending.com updated its Medicaid data.

The federal Medicaid number comes from the Federal Budget Subfunction 558: Grants to states for Medicaid. The state contribution comes from the NHE Tables.

usgovernmentspending.com publishes "guesstimates" of state and local spending from the latest year published by the Census Bureau (currently FY 2023) to the last year in the Historical Tables of the federal budget. (currently 2029 from the FY25 budget). So we have developed "guesstimates" of Medicaid spending going out to 2029, assuming that the overall Medicaid spending increases at the same rate as the federal "Grants to States for Medicaid" increases.

National Health Expenditure data is updated each year in mid December.