According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), annual net interest spending on the projected national debt which already costs more than our national defense budget — up 153% since Joe Biden first took office — will grow more than 36% higher within a decade.
U.S. debt held by the public (DHBP) — money that government owes to itself expressed as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP) — reached $29 trillion in 2024, 99% of GDP, $2 trillion more than the 97% at the end of 2023.
This unsustainable deadly trend is on track to reach 116% of GDP in 2034, and upward to 166% of GDP by mid-century (2054).
To put this escalation into a recent time perspective, when President Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980 in large part to bring President Jimmy Carter’s inflationary budget under control, the $930 billion debt represented about 30% of GDP.
By the time President Trump was elected the first time (2016) it had erupted to $20 trillion, having since risen to $36 trillion and 125 percent of GDP while President Biden was in office.
This current annual U.S. budget of $7 trillion amounts to federal spending of nearly $20 billion per day and $830 million per hour. According to CBO’s spending baseline for 2025-2034 amounts to $85 trillion, nearly equaling the annual GDP of the entire world this year.
Within 25 years, barring some monetary miracle, debt service will exceed today’s entire federal budget, including Social Security, defense, Medicare, education, highways, and national parks.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration’s DOGE initiative headed by Elon Musk to cut at least $2 trillion of disastrously wasteful federal spending annually has got muddy Washington swamp waters roiling.
DOGE diggers began by unearthing decades of massive spending and waste abuses by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), in many cases for pet projects that have enriched domestic and foreign bureaucrats . . . taxpayer money intended to assist other countries recovering from disasters, trying to escape poverty, and engaging in democratic reforms.
Included are: $1.5 million to "advance diversity equity and inclusion in Serbia’s workplaces and business communities," $70,000 for production of a "DEI musical" in Ireland, $47,000 for a "transgender opera" in Colombia, $32,000 for a "transgender comic book" in Peru, and $2 million for sex changes and "LGBT activism" in Guatemala.
Hundreds of thousands more American dollars were gifted to a non-profit linked to designated terrorist organizations, millions went to EcoHealth Alliance which was involved in virus research at the Wuhan lab believed linked to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Additionally, hundreds of millions funded "irrigation canals, farming equipment, and even fertilizer used to support the unprecedented poppy cultivation and heroin production in Afghanistan," benefiting the Taliban.
As a consequence of this DOGE discovery, effective today all direct-hire USAID employees globally, other than designated mission-critical personnel and core leadership for specially designated programs, are being put on administrative leave.
To the extent that USAID continues to exist, it will likely operate under U.S. State Department control and oversight.
The Department of Education (DoE) is the next probable agency to be "DOGEd" and "Trumped," with strong prospects of being eliminated altogether with its responsibilities and functions transferred to state control.
This won’t be a slam dunk, nowehere near one.
Some of the department’s most significant programs are required by federal legislation, including Title I money for low-income schools and federal student loans.
Trump had campaigned on a pledge to shut down the department, arguing that it has been infiltrated by "radicals, zealots, and Marxists," wastes money, and inserts the federal government into local education decisions.
Dozens of Education Department employees were put on paid leave last Friday in response to an executive order banning diversity, equity and inclusion efforts throughout the federal government and calling for DEI officials to be fired to the "maximum extent allowed by law."
Whereas another executive order reportedly under preparation by the White House appears to recognize that Congress alone controls the agency’s current $79 billion annual budget, the president would urge his GOP House and Senate majority pass a measure abolishing it while simultaneously directing his education chief to begin winding operations down.
Although Trump, at the time of this writing, has not yet signed such an order, he recently quipped at a White House press conference that the first task for his education secretary nominee Linda McMahon would be "to put herself out of a job."
The House had failed to pass a proposed bill to close the agency in 2023, with 60 Republicans joining Democrats in opposing it.
Last week, Rep. Thomas Masie, R-Ky, again introduced legislation to shut it down with a one sentence statement that the Education Department "shall terminate on December 31, 2026."
Meeting DOGE objectives will require brave battles with lots of defensive swamp creatures representing special interests of both political parties: eliminating several agencies entirely, dramatically slashing budgets of several others, and terminating massively wasteful subsidy and tax credit boondoggles for costly "green energy" and low-demand electric vehicles.
Nevertheless, as pointed out by the 2024 U.S. House Budget Committee, "if we don’t act, we will be the first of our nation’s leaders to leave the next generation not with a better and brighter future, but with a worse and weaker country than we inherited."
It’s urgent that we reverse this current debt death spiral threatening our children, and theirs, while there is still a fighting chance.
Larry Bell is an endowed professor of space architecture at the University of Houston where he founded the Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture and the graduate space architecture program. His latest of 12 books is "Architectures Beyond Boxes and Boundaries: My Life By Design" (2022). Read Larry Bell's Reports — More Here.