‘This cannot be sustainable’: The U.S. borrowed $50 billion a week for the past five months, the CBO says
US President Donald Trump speaks during the Republican Members Issues Conference at Trump National Doral in Miami, Florida, on March 9, 2026. SAUL LOEB / AFP - Getty Images
The United States government continued to add to its deficit as fiscal year 2026 progressed, according to the latest budget update from the Congressional Budget Office. The report, released yesterday and covering data through February 2026, shows that the federal deficit grew by another $1 trillion during the first five months of the fiscal year.
In February alone, the government is estimated to have borrowed $308 billion.
Rising borrowing has also pushed up the cost of servicing the national debt. From the beginning of the fiscal year in October 2025 through February, the Treasury paid $31 billion more in net interest on the debt than during the same period the year before. Altogether, interest payments reached $433 billion over those five months as the national debt approached $38.9 trillion.
The Congressional Budget Office said the increase in interest costs was driven by a larger overall debt and higher long-term interest rates. Lower short-term interest rates helped offset part of the increase.
Even with the large deficit numbers, the government actually borrowed less than it did during the same period the previous fiscal year. Between October 2024 and February 2025, borrowing was $142 billion higher than it has been so far in fiscal year 2026. Still, the figures are unlikely to satisfy advocates of tighter fiscal policy.
Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, warned that interest payments on the national debt are projected to pass $1 trillion this year and could climb above $2 trillion annually by 2036. She said the current trend cannot continue indefinitely and urged policymakers to work together to reduce deficits. MacGuineas suggested setting a target of keeping the deficit at about 3 percent of the nation’s economic output as a first step toward stabilizing the debt relative to the size of the economy.
Economists generally focus less on the total dollar amount of government debt and more on the debt-to-GDP ratio, which compares borrowing to economic growth. If debt grows too large relative to the economy, rising interest costs can begin to weigh on growth. In recent years, the federal deficit has typically ranged between 5 percent and 6 percent of GDP.
During the first five months of fiscal year 2026, the deficit narrowed compared with the previous year not because spending fell, but because government revenues increased enough to offset higher expenditures.
Customs duties, including revenue from tariffs, rose sharply. Collections from those duties were more than four times higher than in the same period a year earlier, bringing in an additional $109 billion. Some tariffs collected in 2025 will need to be refunded to importers following a Supreme Court ruling issued on February 20. However, new tariffs announced by President Trump are expected to keep the overall revenue impact relatively limited. Additional revenue also came from increases in individual income taxes and payroll taxes, which together rose by $132 billion.
At the same time, government spending continued to climb. Federal outlays reached $3.1 trillion during the first five months of the fiscal year, $64 billion more than in the same period the year before. The largest increases came from the government’s three biggest programs—Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid—which together cost $104 billion more than they did a year earlier.
Spending also increased at the Department of Defense and the Department of Veterans Affairs. Meanwhile, several agencies reduced spending, including the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Department of Education. The Environmental Protection Agency reported $20 billion less in spending compared with last year, largely because it had issued $20 billion in clean energy grants in November and December 2024 under a program created by the 2022 reconciliation law.
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