Here’s what they’re climbing against. The gross national debt crossed $40 trillion in August — after hitting $38 trillion in October and $39 trillion in March. A trillion dollars every five months. The deficit hit $2 trillion with a month still left in the fiscal year. In 2025, Moody’s became the last of the three major credit rating agencies to strip the United States of its AAA rating, joining S&P (2011) and Fitch (2023).

In The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway’s Bill Gorton asks his drinking buddy Mike Campbell how he went bankrupt. “Two ways,” Mike replies. “Gradually and then suddenly.” We’re deep into “gradually.”

The stakes are bigger than the debt. Reserve currency status is why the world lends us money cheap, why we can run deficits that would break any other country, and why American sanctions have teeth. That privilege rests on confidence that America pays its bills. And confidence gets lost the same way Mike Campbell went bankrupt.

The compounding has already started. In fiscal year 2025, net interest payments hit $970 billion — about $150 billion more than we spent on national defense — and rose another $111 billion, or 12%, this year. America now pays more to its creditors than to its military, and interest is the fastest growing major program in the budget, projected to more than double to $2.1 trillion by 2036. We’re rolling over an adjustable-rate loan the size of the economy. Last week, the rate adjusted.

For the first 200 years, Congress lived relatively within its means; before Keynesian economics, they called it “old-time fiscal religion.” Then came the Congressional Budget Act of 1974, creating a process for a budget resolution and 12 appropriations bills — a process Congress has completed on time exactly four times in the half-century since. It won’t be five this year. With not one of the 12 bills enacted, Congress punted to December 11 so members could campaign first.

So why won’t Congress fix it? I watched the answer from the inside.

As a Senate budget staffer, I helped put an actual budget resolution on the floor in the summer of 2022 — (then) Senator Mike Braun’s attempt to make the Senate do the one thing the Budget Act requires of it. The motion to proceed failed 34–63 and didn’t garner a single news story. That wasn’t a vote against our budget; it was a vote against debating any budget at all. We learned that one cannot legislate political will.

The gimmicks are everywhere once you know where to look. First enacted in 1990 and made permanent in 2010, statutory PAYGO requires new spending to be offset with new revenues. The spending happens in the first few years; the taxes show up later — and then, conveniently, never show up at all. Take the Affordable Care Act’s revenues: Congress deferred a tax here and a tax there, then made most of them go away. It’s no different than Enron’s mark-to-market accounting — booking hypothetical profits today to pay out bonuses without a real dollar coming in the door. The difference is people in the private sector went to jail.

The caps Congress writes, Congress waives: “emergency” designations exempt spending from every fiscal rule, and the PAYGO scorecard — the mechanism that’s supposed to trigger automatic cuts for deficit-increasing laws — is waived with a few words on the last page of every omnibus. Meanwhile, the Pentagon has failed eight straight audits; in 2022 it couldn’t fully account for 61% of its $3.5 trillion in assets — not exactly a report you’d share with your banker.

And here’s the part the public rarely hears: the fiscal fights on cable news cover only 27% of the budget — discretionary spending. Politicians get to ignore mandatory spending (60%) and interest on the debt (13%).

None of this is a secret to the referee. The CBO produces long-term budget outlooks that now sound like a broken record: rising debt risks a fiscal crisis in which investors lose confidence, rates rise abruptly, and the dollar’s reserve status erodes. The doctor has put it in the chart. The bloodwork is slipping. The only question is whether anybody reads the file.

It has been said that in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. That’s America’s real condition as the world’s reserve currency — not healthy, just healthier than everybody else in the ward, even as foreign investors hold a shrinking share of U.S. debt. Maybe that’s the bet: as long as we’re better than the alternatives, the money has nowhere else to go, and the heart attack never comes.

But “better than everybody else” is a relative measure, and relative measures move. Britain was the world reserve until they weren’t. The ratings agencies have spoken. The government’s own scorekeeper has put its warning in writing. And Congress is asleep at the wheel. Heart attacks don’t announce themselves — when one shows up, austerity looks like stents and valves, and that’s presuming you get to the ER in time.

Being king only works if we keep that one eye open. Gradually is now. Suddenly is the part nobody schedules.

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