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 October 16, 2025, the US Treasury reported in its Monthly Treasury Statement (and xlsx) for September that the federal deficit for FY 2025 ending September 30, 2025, was $1,775 billion. Here are the numbers, including total receipts, total outlays, and deficit compared with the numbers projected in the FY 2025 federal budget published in February 2024:

We use the spending projections from the FY 2025 budget because the Federal government did not publish spending projections in its Budget for Fiscal Year 2026 as originally published in May 2025.

The Monthly Treasury Statement includes "Table 4: Receipts of the United States Government, September 2025 and Other Periods." This table of receipts by source is used for usgovernmentspending.com to post details of federal receipt actuals for FY 2025. usdgovernmentspending.com obtains the data for outlays and receipts from apis at fiscaldata.treasury.gov.

This MTS report on FY 2025 actuals is a problem for usgovernmentspending.com because this site uses Historical Table 3.2--Outlays by Function and Subfunction from the Budget of the United States as its basic source for federal subfunction outlays. But the Monthly Treasury Statement only includes "Table 9. Summary of Receipts by Source, and Outlays by Function of the U.S. Government, September 2025 and Other Periods". Subfunction amounts don't get reported until the FY27 budget in February 2026. Until then usgovernmentspending.com estimates actual outlays by "subfunction" for FY 2025 by factoring subfunction budgeted amounts for FY25 by the ratio between relevant actual and budgeted "function" amounts where actual outlays by subfunction cannot be gleaned from the Monthly Treasury Statement.