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The Congressional Budget Office forecasts that annual deficits will top $21 trillion over the next decade.
Jan. 17, 2025, 12:00 p.m. ET
The United States is poised to add trillions of dollars to the national debt over the next decade as the mounting costs of social safety net programs and growing interest expenses dig the nation into a deeper fiscal hole, according to a report released on Friday by the Congressional Budget Office.
The new budget forecasts predicted that the United States will record a $1.9 trillion budget deficit this fiscal year and that annual deficits over the next decade will total $21.1 trillion. That will be piled on to a national debt that currently exceeds $36 trillion.
By 2035, the debt as a share of the U.S. economy will rise to 118 percent, the largest in history. The debt is currently 100 percent of gross domestic product.
Although the figures show slightly smaller deficits than what the C.B.O. projected last June, thanks to higher salaries and stock values, the nation’s fiscal situation is poised to become far more precarious.
That’s because the budget office’s outlook assumes that the 2017 tax cuts that are scheduled to expire this year will actually come to an end, and that tax revenues will start to increase next year. But with President-elect Donald J. Trump set to retake the White House next week and Republicans fully in control of Congress, those tax cuts are almost certainly going to be extended.
Continuing the tax cuts is expected to cost more than $4 trillion over the next decade, according to previous estimates from the Congressional Budget Office.
