WASHINGTON — The U.S. gross national debt crossed $40 trillion for the first time, Treasury Department figures showed Wednesday, arriving faster than the Congressional Budget Office projected and less than five months after the total passed $39 trillion.
The daily financial report put outstanding debt at $40.05 trillion as of Aug. 18, more than double the figure a decade earlier and within about $1 trillion of the $41.1 trillion statutory ceiling. The CBO had projected borrowing would reach $39.6 trillion by the end of fiscal 2026; the government cleared that mark roughly six weeks early.
The milestone lands as annual interest costs approached $1 trillion in 2025 — roughly 14 percent of federal spending and now larger than the government's outlays on national defense or Medicare. The 30-year Treasury yield hit 5.34 percent on Tuesday, its highest in nearly 20 years, pushing mortgage, auto-loan and credit-card rates higher.
How the total grew
The debt crossed $38 trillion in October 2025 and $39 trillion in March, meaning the country added $2 trillion in about 10 months. The CBO expects the total to climb to about $64 trillion by 2036, with annual deficits expanding from roughly $2.1 trillion this year to $3.1 trillion within a decade. The Peter G. Peterson Foundation projects the debt could reach $50 trillion in six years.
Michael A. Peterson, chief executive of the foundation, told CBS News: "We've been running deficits for the last 26 years, and we've basically ignored a lot of the structural challenges that exist in our budget that are very well known." The CBO estimates the One Big Beautiful Bill, the tax-and-spending package Congress passed last year, will add $4.2 trillion to the debt through fiscal 2034.
Treasury intervenes
To calm long-dated yields, the Treasury said Wednesday it would at least double its bond buyback operations, to $4 billion, between Sept. 9 and Nov. 4. The 30-year yield eased to 5.18 percent after the announcement.
John Canavan, lead analyst at Oxford Economics, called the move an "attempt to provide relief" on long-term borrowing costs but told the BBC the increase was "unlikely to provide meaningful long-term relief" given the scale of outstanding Treasury debt. Rene Albrecht of DZ Bank in Germany said the Treasury feared the "pain of 5% or higher yields" three months out from the midterms.
The counterview
Not every economist sees a crisis in the making. Dean Baker, co-founder of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, told CBS News, "We're going the wrong way," but said the more immediate risks to the U.S. economy are tariffs, the Iran war's effect on prices and a potential burst of an artificial-intelligence bubble. Baker argued a strong U.S. economy can shoulder rising debt-service costs and that foreign investors are more likely to pull back over broader market conditions than over the fiscal ledger.
Congress will have to legislate a new borrowing cap before the Treasury runs out of room, with the debt now within roughly $1 trillion of the ceiling.