Fact-checking Joe Biden on debt accumulated under Donald Trump

During his 2024 State of the Union address, President Joe Biden referred frequently to his "predecessor," who happens to be the expected Republican nominee trying to deny him reelection this year.

Without using Donald Trump’s name, Biden focused part of his March 7 speech on his many contrasts with his presidential predecessor, which Biden said extended to management of the nation’s finances.

Trump’s administration "added more to the national debt than any presidential term in American history," Biden said. "Check the numbers, folks."

We did.

Experts say it’s hard to draw a straight line between any president and the debt accrued on their watch. But beyond that, there are different ways to view the numbers, and some of them are not favorable to Biden’s assertion. 

Biden left out that the debt under his watch is on pace to exceed Trump’s one-term debt accumulation by the end of his current term, Jan. 20, 2025. During his first three years, Biden already accumulated $6.32 trillion in debt. For his final year, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has projected a deficit of $1.582 trillion. Add those two figures together and you get $7.902 trillion as Biden’s four-year total.

Treasury Department data shows the gross federal debt rose by about $7.8 trillion on Trump’s watch. 

President Barack Obama during his two presidential terms oversaw a debt increase of more than $9.5 trillion, which exceeds Trump’s total. 

But the White House told PolitiFact that Biden used "any presidential term" to refer to single, four-year terms, and the figure during Trump’s four-year term was higher than any previous four-year presidential term.

That backward-looking distinction is notable. 

So far, debt under Biden’s watch has risen by a little less than $6.7 trillion. That’s smaller than Trump’s total — but again, Biden is on pace to exceed Trump’s mark by the time his term ends.

Another way to analyze this debt is more favorable to Biden, though the White House did not offer it as justification after PolitiFact inquired.

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The day after Biden’s speech, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a Washington-based group that studies fiscal policy, wrote that Trump had signed legislation or executive orders that added $8.4 trillion of new borrowing over 10 years, about half of it in pandemic relief.

The group said this was more than any prior president in dollar terms, and also more than Biden. The group said it had not recently updated its estimate for Biden but said that it was "significantly smaller" than Trump’s amount.

However, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget’s method highlights a challenge of assigning debt to any president. 

Using the group’s method, much of the debt allocated to Trump will not show up in the federal ledger until years after he left office in 2021. This reality gets even trickier once mandatory payments are considered.

Much of the current federal debt stems from mandatory payments, such as those for Social Security and Medicare. These began spiking when the baby boom generation started drawing heavily from these programs around 2010. 

Generations of politicians in both parties approved and modified these programs long before Trump took office.

"It is always challenging to figure out how much spending was on whose watch," Steve Ellis, president of the federal budget-watching nonprofit group Taxpayers for Common Sense, told PolitiFact for a related 2023 fact-check.

Trump’s biggest single federal debt spikes came from the initial rounds of coronavirus relief legislation in 2020. Trump signed them, but they passed with broad bipartisan support.

"Everyone, including me, said it was worth it, and without it, things would have been worse," Douglas Holtz-Eakin, president of the center-right American Action Forum, told PolitiFact in 2023. "So, (it’s) not fair to blame Trump exclusively for something everyone thought was needed."

Biden said the Trump administration "added more to the national debt than any presidential term in American history."

Trump did accumulate more debt during his term than any previous president’s single term, and also more than Biden has accumulated so far in his tenure. But Biden’s tenure isn’t over yet.

Projections say that Biden’s four-year term debt will exceed the total debt accumulated under Trump. Also, assigning debt to a particular president can be misleading because so much of it traces back to decades-old, bipartisan legislation that set the parameters for Social Security and Medicare.

The statement is partially accurate but needs additional context, so we rate it Half True.