Federal Debt increased sharply in response to the Great Recession of 2006-08, with debt rising from $9 trillion in 2007 to $15 trillion in 2011. Federal debt continues to increase about $1 trillion per year.

At the end of FY2022 federal debt was $30.93 trillion.

Viewed as percent of GDP the increase in federal debt is not so startling. But federal debt has still increased from 60 percent of GDP to over 100 percent of GDP in less than ten years, and has remained at about 100 percent of GDP since 2012.

At the end of FY2022 the federal debt was 127.5 percent of GDP.

US Federal Debt Since 1900

Federal debt began the 20th century at less than 10 percent of GDP. It jerked above 30 percent as a result of World War I and then declined in the 1920s to 16.3 percent by 1929. Federal debt started to increase after the Crash of 1929, and rose above 40 percent in the depths of the Great Depression.

Federal debt exploded during World War II to over 120 percent of GDP, and then began a decline that bottomed out at 32 percent of GDP in 1974. Federal debt almost doubled in the 1980s, reaching 60 percent of GDP in 1990 and peaking at 66 percent of GDP in 1996, before declining to 56 percent in 2001. Federal debt started increasing again in the 2000s, reaching 70 percent of GDP in 2008. Then it exploded in the aftermath of the Crash of 2008, reaching 102 percent of GDP in 2011.

Federal debt has breached 100 percent of GDP twice since 1900: during World War II and in the aftermath of the Crash of 2008.

US Federal Interest Since 1900

Federal interest payments began the 20th century at less than 0.2 percent of GDP. But the debt incurred in World War One caused the debt to explode to over 1.3 percent of GDP in 1921, and debt interest cost about one percent of GDP through the middle of World War II. Interest expense peaked at 1.7 percent of GDP in 1946 and settled down to about 1.1 to 1.2 percent of GDP until the 1970s.

Federal Interest payments cost 1.39 percent of GDP in 1974 and continued climbing, as the Federal Reserve increased interest rates, reaching 1.51 percent of GDP in 1978, 2.14 percent of GDP in 1981 before peaking at 3.16 percent of GDP in 1991. With a recession in 1990 and spending cuts in the 1990s, interest expense declined to 1.31 percent of GDP by 2004. Then it increased briefly before credit was relaxed in the Great Recession of 2008-09. Interest expense held steady at about 1.3 percent of GDP for the mid 2010s, rising to 1.75 percent GDP in 2019 before declining modestly during the COVID pandemic of 2020-2021.

US Federal Debt since the Founding

The United States federal government began with a substantial debt, the cost of the Revolutionary War. Under Alexander Hamilton’s funding system the debt was paid off by 1840. Government debt has typically peaked after wars. It breached 30 percent of GDP after the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and World War I. It breached 100 percent of GDP in World War II. Government debt also breached 100 percent of GDP in the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008.

Gross Federal Debt vs. Net Debt

The US federal government differentiates between Gross Debt issued by the US Treasury and Net Debt held by the public. The numbers on Gross Debt are published by the US Treasury here.

Numbers on various categories of federal debt, including Gross Debt, debt held by federal government accounts, debt held by the public, and debt held by the Federal Reserve System, are published every year by the Office of Management and Budget in the Federal Budget in the Historical Tables as Table 7.1 – Federal Debt at the End of the Year. The table starts in 1940. You can find the latest Table 7.1 in here.

The chart above shows three categories of federal debt.

1. Monetized debt (blue), i.e., federal debt bought by the Federal Reserve System

2. Debt held by the federal government (red) e.g., as IOUs for Social Security

3. Other debt (green), i.e., debt in public hands, including foreign governments.

CBO Long Term Forecast for Federal Debt

According to the latest forecast from the Congressional Budget Office, the federal public-held debt will grow from 102 percent of GDP in 2021 to 195 percent of GDP by 2050.

On October 21, 2022, the US Treasury reported in its Monthly Treasury Statement (and xlsx) for September that the federal deficit for FY 2022 ending September 30, 2022, was $x,xxx billion. Here are the numbers, including total receipts, total outlays, and deficit compared with the numbers projected in the FY 2023 federal budget published in February 2022:

usgovernmentspending.com now shows the new numbers for total FY 2022 total outlays and receipts on its Estimate vs. Actual page.

The Monthly Treasury Statement includes "Table 4: Receipts of the United States Government, September 2022 and Other Periods." This table of receipts by source is used for usgovernmentspending.com to post details of federal receipt actuals for FY 2022.

This MTS report on FY 2022 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 2022 and Other Periods". Subfunction amounts don't get reported until the FY24 budget in February 2023. Until then usgovernmentspending.com estimates actual outlays by "subfunction" for FY 2022 by factoring subfunction budgeted amounts for FY22 by the ratio between relevant actual and budgeted "function" amounts where actual outlays by subfunction cannot be gleaned from the Monthly Treasury Statement.