The Latest Breaking News from National Debt

The Peter G. Peterson Foundation, a nonpartisan budget watchdog, ran the numbers exclusively for Fortune.

America's large and growing national debt is not just a budgetary liability, but increasingly a geopolitical one too.

Could the richest Americans simply write a check to erase the U.S. debt? I asked ChatGPT to play out this scenario to see what would happen.

“There are fewer opportunities,” Kurt Couchman added. “The opportunities that are there aren’t paying as well. Productivity is being suppressed.”

The staggering math behind the rapid rise in interest due on our outsize debt.

Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, echoed: "Despite being more than a quarter into [2026] our government is still not fully funded for the rest of the fiscal year, with another funding deadline around the corner in just over two weeks."

The costs were higher because of a larger budget burden, the CBO said, as well as "higher long‐term interest rates and an increase in the rate of inflation."

Meanwhile, the Peterson Foundation updated its projection: the U.S. would be spending more on defense than the next 35 countries combined.

The nonpartisan Peter G. Peterson Foundation finds widespread — and bipartisan — concern over the debt.

"Can you imagine if a Pringles distributor paid full retail to Pringles and then sold to grocery stores for full retail, and then the grocery stores had to wait for a rebate?"

Top economists fear the era of fiscal dominance is here, and we’ve abandoned the debt problem already.