WASHINGTON — The U.S. national debt crossed $40 trillion this week, and the congressman who runs the House's budget process wants the country to sit with a smaller number instead: $6 billion. That's what House Budget Committee Chairman Jodey Arrington says the federal government borrows on an average day, and by his account, more than half of that daily sum goes toward interest on money Washington has already spent.
Arrington, a Lubbock Republican, is using the milestone to relaunch a long-shot campaign: asking state legislatures to force a constitutional convention under Article V, a path the Constitution allows but the country has never actually used to amend itself. In his statement, Arrington argued lawmakers are leaving the next generation to cover bills "we are unwilling to pay for ourselves."
Arrington's numbers didn't come only from his own office. The nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget — a watchdog that criticizes overspending under presidents of both parties — confirmed independently that gross debt hit $40 trillion this week, doubling in just the past decade. CRFB president Maya MacGuineas didn't mince words about it, writing that "no one knows how many more of these milestones America can take." Her statement makes the same underlying point Arrington does: that interest payments now outrun the entire national defense budget. It's worth noting gross debt isn't the whole picture — debt held by the public, a narrower figure economists watch more closely, sits at roughly $32 trillion.
Interest Versus Defense: A Real Gap, With an Asterisk
CRFB's own accounting puts net interest at $970 billion for the fiscal year that just ended — just short of $1 trillion. The American Action Forum, using the Congressional Budget Office's broader projections, expects interest to actually cross $1 trillion this fiscal year, compared with $947 billion for the full national-defense budget function CBO tracks. Enacted defense appropriations for the current fiscal year, meanwhile, ran closer to $839 billion, with Congress separately authorizing about $891 billion through the annual defense policy bill. However it's sliced, interest is outpacing defense.
Borrowing $6 Billion a Day — Except When It's More Than Double That
Arrington's "$6 billion a day" line is an average he's used consistently for more than a year, and it roughly matches an annual deficit hovering near $2 trillion. But federal borrowing doesn't arrive in steady daily installments. CRFB reported that the government borrowed $432 billion in July alone — working out to $14 billion a day, more than double Arrington's long-run average — a reminder that tax deadlines and spending cycles can make any single month look far worse, or better, than the yearly trend.
For households outside Washington, rising borrowing costs may matter more than the deficit arithmetic itself. Treasury yields have been climbing for months as investors demand more to hold U.S. debt long-term; a CRFB item published just five days before Arrington's statement clocked a 30-year Treasury auction at 5.216% — a level the bond market hasn't touched since 2001. Those yields ripple outward into mortgage rates, small-business loans and car financing — costs that land hardest on families with the thinnest financial cushion, including many working-class households in South Florida's Venezuelan and Colombian communities and in Houston's Latino neighborhoods. Watchdog groups also warn that as interest eats a bigger share of the federal budget, it competes directly with programs like Medicaid, which already trails interest spending by roughly $300 billion a year and is disproportionately relied on by lower-income Latino families in Texas and Florida. Every dollar redirected to old debt is a dollar lawmakers can't easily spend on housing assistance or immigration-court staffing without either cutting something else or borrowing still more.
How an Article V Convention Would Actually Work
The Constitution offers two roads to an amendment: a two-thirds vote in Congress, which has produced every one of the 27 amendments ratified so far, or a convention called once two-thirds of state legislatures — 34 states — formally request one. That second path has never once been completed. Advocacy groups including the National Taxpayers Union count at least 27 states with live balanced-budget applications on record, though the tally is genuinely disputed because some petitions date back to the 1970s and use varying legal language. Texas filed its own application in 2011, roughly 15 years ago, and Florida's application appears on the list of states cited in a similar 2026 resolution introduced in Maine — though the more current Florida news hook may be Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has publicly championed the same push twice already this year, most recently alongside Kentucky lawmakers in February.
Why Legal Scholars Are Wary
Not everyone treats a convention as routine housekeeping. A long-running legal argument holds that delegates called together to address one narrow issue could not be reliably confined to that topic once the gathering actually convenes; the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has laid out that case in detail, warning there's no enforceable way to stop delegates from wandering into unrelated territory — a concern that traces back to the fact that America's only constitutional convention, in 1787, blew past its own original mandate. Supporters counter that modern balanced-budget proposals build in exceptions for declared wars and emergencies, and argue states have historically kept conventions on-topic when they've had the chance.
What Comes Next
None of the legal debate changes the arithmetic. With gross debt above $40 trillion and interest costs still climbing, Arrington's push faces long odds in a Congress where leaders in both parties have shown little appetite for reopening the amendment process. But the underlying pressure isn't fading: CBO's own projections show interest costs roughly doubling again over the next decade even if nothing else changes, which means the debt-clock milestones — and the renewed Article V push that follows each one — are likely to keep recurring.
