Bessent: US can 'grow our way' out of $40 trillion debt
The Hill · C · trust 60/100
Comments: by Ryan Mancini - 08/20/26 12:55 PM ET Comments: Link copied by Ryan Mancini - 08/20/26 12:55 PM ET Comments: Link copied NOW PLAYING Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on Thursday said the U.S. can “grow” its way out of the $40 trillion national debt , a milestone reached Wednesday.
“Well, I mean, look Sara, there’s nothing magic about the $40 trillion number, and we can grow our way out of that,” Bessent told “Squawk on the Street” co-host Sara Eisen on CNBC.
“But what we do want to signal is I think there’s been a lot of misinformation in terms of what’s going on with the deficit, what’s going on with the deficit to GDP,” he added.
The Treasury chief said a temporary aspect of the debt is the tariff refunds mandated by the Supreme Court in its ruling in February against President Trump’s emergency tariffs. Bessent said that U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer will implement “the same level of tariffs, and I would expect that our 2026 tariff income is going to be roughly what it was in ’25.”
“But with the Section 301 tariffs, I am confident that we will be back to ... the same level if not higher of tariff income for last year,” Bessent later told reporters in front of the White House, where he claimed that despite the $40 trillion milestone, it’s smaller when looking at publicly traded amounts.
He added that the U.S. was “left with this mess” after the Biden administration hit the highest deficit to gross domestic product “in history” outside of a war or recession.
The high court’s 6-3 ruling led to about $100 billion in tariff refunds collected by the Trump administration, a sum that had been garnered under the president’s sweeping “Liberation Day” tariffs in April 2025 and later returned to affected companies. Amazon, for example, received $600 million in refunds in its second financial quarter.
The federal government owes more than $32.2 trillion to outside entities, or debt that’s held by the public, including state and local governments, businesses, and foreign governments and businesses.
The majority of the $7.8 trillion that the U.S. owes to itself is debt held in government trust funds, such as Social Security, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget .
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