Biden's Budget Proposal Estimates Debt Will Hit $50.7 Trillion in 10 Years

TERENCE P. JEFFREY | MARCH 9, 2023 | 5:20PM EST

Text Audio

00:0000:00

Font Size

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and President Joe Biden at the White House, March 3, 2022. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

(CNSNews.com) - President Joe Biden released a fiscal 2024 budget proposal today that estimates the federal debt will hit $50.712 trillion dollars by the end of fiscal 2033.

That would be an increase of $17.988 trillion from the $32.724 trillion that Biden’s budget estimates the debt will be by the end of this fiscal year, which ends on Sept. 30.

As of March 8 of this year, which is the latest date currently reported by the U.S. Treasury, the total federal debt was $31.459 trillion.

In his budget—which proposes increasing the debt to $50.712 trillion over the next ten years—Biden emphasizes his commitment to fiscal responsibility.

 

“Throughout, we have delivered on our commitment to fiscal responsibility, cutting the deficit by more than $1.7 trillion in the first two years of my Administration—the largest reduction in American history,” Biden says in his budget message.

“Importantly,” Biden says in his message, “my Budget does all of this while lowering deficits by nearly $3 trillion over the next decade.”

In a speech he delivered today in Philadelphia to mark the release of his budget proposal, Biden said: “And by the way, in my first two years in office, these first two years, I brought down the deficit a record 1.7 trillion dollars—more than any president has in American history—while doing all the rest of this stuff. Down. And the budget I’m introducing today is going to reduce the deficit by nearly 10 billion—or 3 billion dollars—or trillion dollars over ten years.”

(In fact, the last full fiscal year before Biden took office was fiscal 2020, the year that the COVID-19 pandemic hit. In fiscal 2019, before the pandemic, the federal government spent $4.446 trillion and ran a deficit of $984.388 billion, according to the Monthly Treasury Statement. In fiscal 2020, when the pandemic hit, federal spending spiked to $6.551 trillion and the government ran a deficit of approximately $3.132 trillion. In fiscal 2021, the year Biden took office, federal spending was $6.818 trillion and the deficit was $2.772 trillion. In fiscal 2022, which Biden presided over in its entirety, the federal government spent $6.271 trillion and ran a deficit of $1.375 trillion—which was approximately $1.757 trillion less than the first year of the pandemic but approximately $390.7 billion more than the deficit in the last full fiscal year before the pandemic.)

Table S-2 in Biden’s proposal is entitled “Effect of Budget Proposals on Projected Deficits.” It estimates that, under the “baseline,” the federal deficit would increase from $1.726 trillion in this fiscal year to $2.535 trillion in fiscal 2033--and that the government would run a cumulative deficit of $19.912 trillion deficit in the ten-year period from fiscal 2024 to fiscal 2033.

 

This same Table S-2 estimates that Biden’s new budget proposal would reduce that projected ten-year “baseline” deficit of $19.912 trillion by approximately $2.857 trillion—bringing the cumulative deficit during those ten years down to $17.054 trillion.

Table S-10 in Biden’s budget proposal is entitled “Federal Government Financing and Debt.” It lists what the administration estimates the federal “Debt Subject to Statutory Limitation” will be at the end of each fiscal year through 2033. According to this table in Biden’s budget proposal, the federal debt subject to the statutory limitation will be $32.724 trillion at the end of fiscal 2023.

At the end of fiscal 2033, it will be $50.712 trillion.

 

Under Biden’s budget proposal—according to Biden’s budget proposal--the federal debt would increase by $17.988 trillion over the next ten years.

The total federal debt, according to the U.S. Treasury, first exceeded $17.988 trillion on Nov. 28, 2014, when it rose from $17,963,753,617,957.26 to $18,005,549,328,561.45.

Thus, the $17.988 trillion that Biden’s budget anticipates adding to the federal debt over the next ten fiscal years, exceeds all of the debt that the federal government accumulated in the 238 years from 1776 to fiscal 2014.

https://www.cnsnews.com/article/washington/terence-p-jeffrey/bidens-budget-proposal-estimates-debt-will-hit-507-trillion-10