The CBO Just Confirmed Deficits Will Explode Even in a Booming Economy

CBO Director Philip Swagel just told Congress the nation's spending path is not sustainable.

The budget office's new report says deficits will keep climbing for the next decade no matter how strong the economy gets.

The number attached to that warning should scare every taxpayer in America.

CBO Says the Deficit Keeps Growing Without a Recession in Sight

The Congressional Budget Office released its long-term budget outlook this year.

It projects the annual deficit will reach $3.1 trillion by 2036.

That is nearly double the roughly $1.8 trillion to $1.9 trillion deficit projected for 2026.

Spread across every household in the country, a $3.1 trillion annual deficit works out to more than $23,000 per household in a single year, just to cover one year's shortfall.

Swagel did not blame a recession or a financial crisis for any of it.

He called the sustained deficits "historically unusual."

Unemployment is projected to stay under five percent for the entire ten-year stretch.

That $3.1 trillion deficit works out to 6.7 percent of the entire economy, in a year when growth is supposed to look just fine.

The federal government is projected to add roughly $23.1 trillion in new debt by 2036.

Total debt would climb from $38.56 trillion in 2026 to $61.66 trillion by 2036.

That is the government's own scorekeeper admitting the math simply does not work.

Every dollar of new borrowing generates interest payments that crowd out money for the military, veterans, or anything else Americans actually voted for.

The Man Warning About the Debt Helped Write a Blank Check in 2008

Swagel is not some outside auditor parachuting in to lecture Washington.

He spent years inside the Treasury Department under President George W. Bush, rising to Assistant Secretary for Economic Policy in 2006.

When the subprime mortgage crisis hit in 2008, Swagel and fellow Treasury aide Neel Kashkari wrote the plan that asked Congress for $500 billion to buy up toxic bank assets.

That plan became the blueprint for the Troubled Asset Relief Program.

Swagel then sat on the five-person Treasury committee that decided which banks got the money.

In plain terms, he helped design the moment Washington decided Wall Street's bad bets were the taxpayer's problem to clean up.

Economist Luigi Zingales later confronted Swagel publicly, arguing the bailout was costly and did little good, and Swagel defended it as the only way to stop a full collapse.

That same instinct to write a check first and sort out the cost later is exactly what has turned four years of Biden-era emergency spending into a permanent feature of the federal budget.

The man now telling Congress the math does not work spent the defining crisis of his career proving Washington would always find a way to make someone else pay for it.

Tariffs Are Clawing Back Three Trillion Dollars but It Still Is Not Enough

Here is the part Washington does not want to talk about.

President Trump's tariffs are projected to cut ten-year deficits by roughly $3 trillion on their own.

That is real money pulled out of foreign exporters and funneled back toward the American taxpayer.

Without it, the numbers in this report would look catastrophic instead of merely bad.

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act locked in the 2017 tax cuts permanently, which the CBO counts as a cost even though it is money families and small businesses get to keep.

Defense and homeland security spending is rising too, and that is the bill for rebuilding a military that spent years being hollowed out and finally securing a border Democrats left wide open.

Those line items are not what is driving this crisis.

This Projection Assumes Nothing Goes Wrong and Still Looks This Bad

Four years of Biden-era deficit spending did not happen in a vacuum.

President Biden signed the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan into law in March 2021 on a party-line vote, with every Senate Republican opposed.

He followed it with a $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill and the Inflation Reduction Act, neither of which required a recession to justify the price tag.

The federal government has not run an actual budget surplus since 2001, under either party, and every year of borrowing since then is still sitting on the books generating interest.

That interest bill does not disappear just because the calendar changed.

It compounds year after year, baked permanently into every projection the CBO publishes from here on out.

Trump's tariffs are the first real offset anyone in Washington has produced in a generation.

They are still not enough to undo four straight years of unchecked spending.

The bill for all of it lands on workers who are not even born yet, long after the politicians who signed it are gone.

Sources:

• Ben Whedon, "Annual Deficit to Reach $3T by 2036: Congressional Budget Office," Just the News, October 30, 2026.
• Breitbart News, "CBO Predicts Unsustainable Debt and Deficits by 2036," Breitbart, February 11, 2026.
• Congressional Budget Office, "The Long-Term Budget Outlook," Congressional Budget Office, 2026.
• Congressional Budget Office, "Phillip Swagel Biography," Congressional Budget Office, 2019.