Both parties are to blame for America’s reckless spending

The political class is burning through cash at a record pace

- VERONIQUE DE RUGY CONTRIBUTING WRITER

JEMAL COUNTESS Getty Images for the Peter G. Peterson Foundation
WASHINGTON expends $17 billion per day, and the debt hit $37.5 trillion in late September.

THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT just accumulated an additional $2 trillion in debt over the last 12 months. That's the kind of debt surge America usually racks up in wartime or during major national emergencies. But today, as Republicans and Democrats engage in another budget-driven shutdown drama, we are not at war. There is no pandemic. The economy is humming. And another shutdown is happening. Yet it will solve nothing about the fact that the political class is burning through money at a pace that would make FDR's war cabinet blush.

The Daily Treasury Statement shows total federal debt rising from $35.5 trillion last September to $37.5 trillion this week. In peacetime, with unemployment low and the stock market booming, that's breathtakingly reckless. Yet in Washington, winning at politics matters more than confronting the cause of the problem: relentless overspending, and especially the explosion of entitlement programs.

Republicans, despite their fiscal-hawk branding, have presided over much of this surge. They boast $206 billion in DOGE "savings" and $213 billion in tariff receipts — rounding errors when compared with the debt. As the Tax Foundation's Alex Durante and Garrett Watson point out, tariff revenue does almost nothing to change the country’s fiscal trajectory.