It took 200 years for national debt to hit $1 trillion. Annual interest alone now exceeds that—a ‘crushing legacy we must reverse,’ says budget chair

The U.S.’s eye-watering debt burden poses an “existential threat to the future of our nation,” the chairman of the House Budget Committee has warned, as the country’s borrowing figure tipped over $39 trillion.

Texan Republican Rep. Jodey Arrington highlighted last week that it had taken the U.S. nearly two centuries to build a debt pile worth $1 trillion, whereas a mere matter of decades later, the Treasury is forking out that figure every year merely in service payments on the debt.

For the fiscal year 2025, the Treasury paid $1.22 trillion in interest on the debt, and for FY2026, the government has already paid out $520 billion. By 2036, that figure is expected to hit to $2.1 trillion annually, according to calculations by the Congressional Budget Office.

Indeed, U.S. debt didn’t reach the $1 trillion mark until the early 1980s, hitting $1.1 trillion under President Ronald Reagan.

As Arrington points out: “It took roughly 200 years to accumulate the first $1 trillion. Now we add that in a matter of months. Every child in America today carries a $530,000 share of this debt—a crushing legacy we must reverse. Compounding the problem, we now spend more than $1 trillion a year just on interest to service our debt—more than the entire defense budget and triple the amount when Biden took office.”

Arrington isn’t alone in his concern over the nation’s financial trajectory. Figures o...