Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent commented on the U.S. national debt exceeding $ 40 trillion for the first time, Thursday outside the White House: <\/p>\n
REPORTER: The national debt has passed $ 40 trillion. How concerned are you about that? TREASURY SECRETARY SCOTT BESSENT: The $ 40 trillion is a big number. It is smaller when we look at the publicly traded amount. There are Social Security funds and other government entities. What we’re going to do – we have to grow our way out of this. And as I talked about in Asheville, we are going to talk about a U.S. growth strategy and encourage the rest of the world along with us. Director Russ Vought and I have also been tasked with looking at fiscal consolidation. I think the numbers are not the actual numbers. There are substantial tariff refunds due to the ruling, but with the Section 301 tariffs, I am confident we will be back to the same level – the higher tariff income from last year. We did not get here today. We were left with a mess. The Biden administration had the highest deficit-to-GDP in history when we weren’t at war and we weren’t in a recession. In 2025, we brought it down by more than 10%.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n