The $40 Trillion I Saw Coming...and Voted For Anyway

A personal reflection on the chance Congress had to tackle the debt crisis, how we blew it, and what I would have done differently.

President Obama walks with Vice President Biden and Speaker John Boehner outside the White House.

Author’s late note: Everytime the word “entitlement” is used it stirs up controversy. I understand. It is the government’s word for it, as well, you are ENTITLED to what you’ve invested. It’s not equating it to welfare.

This week the national debt crossed $40 trillion. I keep coming back to a much smaller number: $14 trillion. That’s roughly what the country owed when I arrived in Congress in January 2011 as a 32-year-old Republican freshman from Illinois walking into a Capitol that talked about almost nothing else. We held hearings on it. We gave speeches about it. We nearly defaulted over it. We then built commissions and committees and automatic spending cuts whose entire purpose was to force us to deal with it. Fourteen trillion dollars felt like an emergency.

Now the debt’s at $40 trillion, and although the size of it has nearly tripled since I first had to reckon with it as a Congressman, the attention it currently receives on Capitol Hill is a fraction of the outrage Congress once expressed.

There’s no shortage of people to blame. Republicans ran up the debt. So did Democrats. Trump did, Biden did, Congress did, COVID did. Wars, tax cuts, an aging population drawing more out of Social Security and Medicare, interest piling on interest — it’s all real, and it’s all part of the story. But when I think back to 2011, what I feel isn’t mostly anger at any of that. It’s regret. Because for a short window, I think we actually had a shot at doing something real about the country’s trajectory. And we blew it.

My freshman class showed up in the wreckage of the financial crisis and the Tea Party wave, having promised voters we’d finally do something about spending. I believed that promise. I still think the core instinct was correct: a country can’t spend more than it takes in forever. Debt isn’t a line item on a Treasury website; eventually it’s higher interest payments, less room to maneuver in a crisis, and a bill our kids get stuck paying.

We treated it that way at the time. Paul Ryan’s Budget Committee put out plans that actually tried to grapple with long-term spending growth. Obama had stood up the Simpson-Bowles commission. Senators were quietly working bipartisan numbers. Whatever else was wrong with Washington in 2011, there was at least broad agreement that the trajectory couldn’t continue.

Then came the debt ceiling. By that summer, the government was closing in on its borrowing limit, and with Republicans holding the House and Obama in the White House, that limit became the pressure point for a much bigger fight over the country’s fiscal future. I saw that fight, at the time, the way most young Republicans did: we’d been sent there to cut spending, Obama wanted more revenue, and that was that. I was willing to compromise and put my career on the line. Most weren’t.

Our flat refusal to put any new revenue on the table was one of the things that made a real deal nearly impossible. Taxes were untouchable for Republicans the same way entitlement cuts were untouchable for a lot of Democrats. Both sides had ruled out a major piece of the solution before the negotiation even started.

An actual fix needed both. Republicans needed to tell our voters that some taxes were probably going up, or that a broader, cleaner tax code would need to raise more money one way or another. Democrats needed to tell their voters that entitlement spending would have to change. Neither side could survive doing its half alone. It only worked if both jumped together, so each could say it accepted the painful part because the other side accepted its own.

For a while, it looked like the two men who mattered most were actually willing to try. I believed then, and believe even more now, that Boehner and Obama wanted a real deal. Their talks over what became known as the Grand Bargain floated trillions in deficit reduction through some mix of spending cuts, entitlement changes and new revenue. Obama put things on the table that infuriated his own party. Boehner entertained revenue that infuriated ours. That’s what a genuine negotiation looks like — nobody walks away happy, and everybody swallows something.

The trouble was that the ground underneath Boehner was already moving. It’s easy, looking back, to talk about “Republicans” in 2011 as one bloc. We weren’t. There was a real power struggle inside the conference with Boehner as Speaker and Eric Cantor as Majority Leader increasingly channeling the Tea Party energy that would eventually harden into the Freedom Caucus. And I felt that tension in every caucus meeting and committee markup session.

Boehner was conservative, but he was also an institutionalist who believed governing meant making deals. Cantor understood something about where the conference was heading: a growing bloc that treated compromise itself as betrayal, with taxes as the brightest line of all. When Boehner started exploring a bigger deal with Obama that included revenue, the backlash inside our own ranks showed him exactly how hard it would be to deliver the votes. He might have been ready to jump. He couldn’t be sure anyone would jump with him.

I’d have voted for almost anything serious that meaningfully cut the deficit. But there weren’t enough people in either party willing to eat the political cost, and the Grand Bargain died. I think about that collapse more now than I did then, because history didn’t stop when the talks did. The debt kept climbing.

With the deadline bearing down, Congress passed the Budget Control Act of 2011. I voted yes. It raised the debt ceiling, capped discretionary spending, and created a bipartisan “Super Committee” (12 members, six from each party) tasked with finding at least $1.5 trillion more in deficit reduction.

We also built in a punishment, because we knew ourselves well enough to expect failure. If the committee couldn’t reach a deal, automatic cuts called sequestration would kick in, deliberately built to hurt both sides by targeting defense for Republicans and domestic programs for Democrats. The logic was mutually assured destruction: surely nobody would let it actually happen.

I remember Boehner making exactly that pitch to get our votes. Sequestration wasn’t a real threat, he told us, it was leverage. I trusted him. I was wrong.

The Super Committee worked through the fall of 2011 while Washington waited. There were proposals, counterproposals, arguments over entitlements and revenue involving hundreds of billions of dollars. On November 21, it announced it had failed, for the same reason everything else had failed: Republicans wouldn’t accept enough revenue, Democrats wouldn’t accept enough structural reform.

Even then, most of us assumed Congress would step back from the edge before the cuts actually hit. We weren’t really going to slash the military with an arbitrary meat cleaver instead of fixing the programs actually driving the debt, were we? We were. On March 1, 2013, sequestration took effect.

This might be what I regret most. Cutting the deficit was never supposed to be about making a number smaller for its own sake. Government has real obligations like national defense, a safety net for people who genuinely can’t provide for themselves, infrastructure, research, the things that keep America competitive. Serious fiscal policy sorts those obligations from the spending that’s just inertia. Sequestration didn’t sort anything. Because so much mandatory spending was walled off, the cuts landed hardest on discretionary programs, defense included. Training got canceled, maintenance got deferred, civilians got furloughed, and military leaders spent years warning that readiness was eroding. We hollowed out the investments that actually mattered instead of reforming what was actually driving the debt.

That’s not what I thought I was voting for. I thought I was voting for a mechanism that would force hard choices. Instead, the mechanism replaced the choices, and we spent the next decade living with what was left.

Looking back, I think we should have done close to the opposite: reformed entitlements over the long term while protecting the benefits people actually depend on, asked more of people who could afford it, cleaned out the deductions and loopholes that survive only because someone powerful benefits from them, and protected the spending that keeps the country secure and competitive. In other words, we should have governed.

I’m still a fiscal conservative. But fiscal conservatism can’t mean pretending taxes are permanently off the table. That was one of my party’s real mistakes. We turned opposition to any tax increase from a policy position into something closer to dogma, and any Republican who broke from it risked a primary. That took an entire half of the federal ledger off the table before talks even began.

It’s easier to see the absurdity of that from a distance. Picture a couple deep in debt, sitting down to fix their finances. One says they’ll discuss cutting expenses but will not, under any circumstances, discuss earning more. The other says the opposite. Then they wonder why the balance keeps growing. That was Washington.

Democrats had their mirror-image problem. Touch Social Security or Medicare and you were attacking seniors. Suggest means-testing and you were shredding the social contract. Slow the growth rate of a program and suddenly you’d “cut” it. So Republicans yelled tax increase, Democrats yelled Medicare cut, everyone retreated to their corner, and the debt kept collecting interest in the meantime.

What happened next may be worse than any of that. We stopped fighting about the debt at all. In 2011, both parties disagreed bitterly about how to fix it. Today, most of Washington barely bothers pretending it’s a priority. Republicans discovered they liked tax cuts just fine without spending cuts attached. Democrats kept defending entitlement programs without making them solvent.

That abandonment is no longer theoretical. Last year, a Republican president and Republican Congress enacted a law that CBO now says added $4.7 trillion to projected deficits over the coming decade, including the interest costs. Many of the same people who built careers warning that debt would destroy the country celebrated adding trillions more, because this time the borrowing paid for Republican priorities.

And voters rewarded the dishonesty, because we asked for it too. We wanted lower taxes and higher spending, Social Security and Medicare intact, the strongest military on earth, modern roads and bridges, disaster relief, stimulus checks, tax credits — everything, with no bill attached. So Washington borrowed the difference.

Now the bill owed is $40 trillion.

The number itself is almost too big to hold in your head, but there’s one piece of it worth understanding: interest. Borrowed money doesn’t just sit there as principal; it has to be serviced. That means a growing share of the taxes our kids will pay won’t build anything, educate anyone, or fund a single new priority. It’ll just cover decisions we already made.

The real cost of debt is not the number itself, but rather what it takes away. Every dollar that goes to servicing yesterday’s borrowing is a dollar some future Congress no longer gets to decide how to spend. Whatever crisis comes next — recession, pandemic, war, something none of us can picture yet — America will walk into it $40 trillion in the hole and climbing.

We’re still an enormously wealthy country. We hold the world’s reserve currency and every advantage that comes with it. I’m not saying America goes bankrupt tomorrow. I’m saying arithmetic eventually gets a vote, whether we’re ready for it or not.

I didn’t understand all of this in 2011. I was a freshman who believed spending was the problem, and I still think spending is a huge part of it. What I understand now that I didn’t then is that you cannot fix something this size while treating every position your own side considers sacred as untouchable.

We couldn’t do it then. Democrats couldn’t do it then. Congress can’t do it now. Fixing this would still take the same bargain we failed to strike fifteen years ago: Republicans accepting more revenue, Democrats accepting entitlement reform, benefits protected for the people who actually need them, wealthier Americans paying more or receiving less, a tax code that raises enough without choking growth, waste cut where it’s real, and defense spending disciplined without becoming the only place politicians are brave enough to touch.

I cast a lot of votes over twelve years in Congress. Most of them I’ve forgotten. I still think about the Budget Control Act. I voted for it believing it would force something bigger to happen. I believed sequestration was too stupid for Congress to actually let it happen. Maybe that was naive. What bothers me isn’t that sequestration happened, it’s that the deal it was supposed to force us into never came.

We had almost everything a real agreement needed: a Democratic president willing to anger his own party, a Republican Speaker willing to anger his, a genuine fiscal crisis, broad agreement that the path was unsustainable, real plans on the table from serious people, and a mechanism built specifically to force our hand. We had all of that when the debt was $14 trillion.

We still couldn’t do it.

Washington has a bad habit of assuming hard problems can wait for later — the next Congress, the next president, the next commission. Later has arrived. The debt is $40 trillion now, and someday another young member will walk into that building and wonder how the people who came before them saw this coming, understood exactly what it would cost, had a real chance to act, and didn’t.

I was one of those people. I wish we had.