Everyone Says the Debt Is a Problem. So Why Is It Not a Priority? 

Written by Matt Andrews

This is the second in a series of posts examining the United States federal debt through the lens of problem-solving governance and state capability. 

In the first post in this series, I introduced a puzzle. The United States has extraordinary fiscal capacity. It has sophisticated institutions, extensive data, experienced officials, active think tanks, and unparalleled access to financial markets. Yet its political system has been unable to address a fiscal problem that it has recognized for decades.  

Why? 

To think about this, it is useful to distinguish between problems that receive attention and problems that generate action: 

• The former sit on what we call the symbolic agenda. Political leaders talk about them. Experts produce reports about them. The media publish alarming stories. Citizens say they are concerned. Governments promise action. But nothing consequential follows. 

• A problem moves onto the real agenda only when people are prepared to organize around it and do something. Decision-making processes are created. Resources and authority are mobilized. Actors accept responsibility. Difficult choices are made, implemented, and subjected to accountability. 

The United States federal debt sits awkwardly between these two agendas. 

Concern about the debt is widespread. In 2025, 53 percent of Americans told Gallup that they worried a great deal about federal spending and the budget deficit. Newspapers across the political spectrum regularly describe the fiscal trajectory as dangerous. Conservative, progressive and centrist think tanks disagree about its causes, but they generally agree that it cannot continue indefinitely. The Government Accountability Office and Congressional Budget Office have issued increasingly direct warnings. 

The debt is therefore visible. It is discussed. It is periodically described as a crisis. But it does not appear to be generating sustained collective action. 

This is an important challenge for what we—with our colleagues Quinton Mayne, Jorrit de Jong and Fernando Fernandez-Monge—call problem driven (or problem solving)  governance and capability.  

The first task in this kind of governance process—focused on making, implementing and accounting for decisions to address collective problems—is not finding a solution. It is establishing agreement that a condition represents a problem around which people are prepared to act.  Drawing on work by my colleague Marshall Ganz, we only get to the point of agreement (and potential action) when we have credible answers to three questions: Why this? Why us? Why now? I believe the United States has not yet produced answers to these questions that are sufficiently compelling, broadly shared, and politically actionable. 

Why this? 

“Why this?” asks why the federal debt should receive priority over the many other problems competing for public attention. The difficulty is that addressing the debt does not involve one isolated intervention. Reducing deficits requires some combination of increased revenue, reduced expenditure, and stronger economic growth. Growth can help, but it is unlikely to eliminate the need to choose what government provides and how it is financed. 

The abstract objective of deficit reduction therefore quickly becomes a series of concrete and politically difficult choices. People may want lower deficits, but they also want low taxes. They want a strong military, but they do not necessarily want to pay more to finance it. They want reliable infrastructure, good schools, and continued investment in scientific research. They want accessible healthcare. They want Social Security and Medicare to provide security in retirement. They may support lower government spending generally while opposing cuts to the programs that matter to them. 

These preferences are not individually unreasonable. But they do not add up fiscally. 

The difficulty becomes apparent when general support for deficit reduction is translated into specific proposals. A 2025 Gallup survey found that nearly half of all Americans wanted deficit reduction to come mainly or entirely through spending cuts. Far fewer favored relying primarily on higher taxes. 

But which spending should be cut? 

The largest expenditure commitments include Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, defense, and veterans’ programs. These serve large and politically influential constituencies—and these constituencies don’t want the cuts! 

A February 2026 Economist/YouGov survey makes the tension unusually clear. Forty-three percent of Americans said they wanted to decrease federal spending overall. Yet when asked about specific areas, majorities favored increasing spending on veterans (74 percent), Social Security (69 percent), Medicare (67 percent), aid to the poor (64 percent), and Medicaid (59 percent). These are preferences for increases, not simply for leaving current spending alone.  

In that survey, more respondents favored decreasing than increasing spending in only two of the ten areas tested: foreign aid and Immigration and Customs Enforcement. In each case, 49 percent favored a decrease. These are pluralities, not majorities.  

Together, these trends lead to political leaders promising broad groups protection from tax increases or spending cuts while also promising to reduce deficits. It’s like saying 2+2 = 0. 

“Why this?” therefore competes with “not this tax,” “not this benefit,” “not this program” and “not this constituency.” 

Something deeper may also be at work in the American political imagination. The United States is accustomed to thinking of itself as a country with unusually broad possibilities. It expects to maintain the world’s strongest military, reward enterprise, keep taxes comparatively low, protect major social commitments and respond forcefully to crises. 

We are an exceptional nation. Not a limited one. 

But talk of fiscal adjustment introduces the language of limits. It suggests that not every preference can be satisfied simultaneously. For an exceptional and exceptionally wealthy country, that can be a difficult proposition to accept. Why should the United States tighten its belt? Why can it not grow its way out of the problem, identify enough waste to remove it, or postpone the choices until conditions are more favorable? 

The fiscal problem is therefore not competing only with other policy priorities. It is competing with a national expectation that we can avoid difficult trade-offs. 

Why us? 

Even when people agree that a problem matters, action is unlikely unless they accept some responsibility for addressing it. The federal debt makes this difficult because people can always locate responsibility elsewhere. 

Republicans can blame excessive government spending by Democrats. Democrats can blame insufficient revenue and unpaid-for tax reductions by the Republicans. Current administrations can blame inherited conditions. Members of Congress can criticize the aggregate deficit while defending the individual tax and spending provisions their constituents favor. Citizens can blame politicians while opposing changes that would affect their own taxes or benefits. 

Each explanation contains some truth. Spending decisions matter. Revenue decisions matter. Demographic change matters. Economic shocks matter. Interest rates matter—and so do choices made by successive presidents and Congresses. 

The problem arises, however, when these partial explanations become instruments for transferring responsibility. 

The fiscal debate then becomes an exercise in blame rather than a process of collective problem construction. Data are selected to show that the problem belongs to the other party, another administration or another social group. Each side develops a narrative that absolves its own coalition. 

This happens across the policy community. Different think tanks often begin from the same fiscal projections but construct sharply different accounts of what produced them. Some emphasize spending and government growth. Others emphasize population aging and a revenue base weakened by unpaid-for tax cuts. These interpretations are not necessarily false. The difficulty is that they can harden boundaries rather than help people work across them. 

This is where collaborative governance capability becomes important. Collaboration does not require everyone to agree about every cause or every remedy. It requires actors to develop a common-enough understanding to work together. They must be able to say: we interpret parts of this problem differently, but we accept that it is real, that none of us can address it alone and that each of us has some responsibility for the choices ahead. 

The United States does not currently have an effective forum for developing that understanding. Budget processes divide decisions across committees and institutions. Electoral incentives reward assigning blame. Interest groups are organized to protect particular provisions. Citizens experience program benefits and tax preferences directly, while the resulting fiscal cost is spread across the population and over time. 

The result is a problem everyone recognizes but no actor genuinely owns. 

Why now? 

The final question is especially difficult because of the timing of fiscal costs and benefits: 

• Acting on the deficit creates costs now. Taxes may increase. Programs may grow more slowly. Eligibility rules or benefits may change. Public investments stop. Political leaders must ask current voters to accept visible and often concentrated losses. 

• The benefits of action are less immediate. A more sustainable fiscal position reduces future interest payments. It gives future governments more room to respond to recessions, wars, pandemics and natural disasters. It lowers the risk of an abrupt fiscal adjustment. It protects economic opportunities that borrowing and interest costs might otherwise crowd out. These benefits matter enormously. But they are often dispersed, uncertain and located in the future. 

Borrowing produces the opposite political arrangement. It lets government provide benefits or cut taxes now while shifting part of the cost forward. Present constituencies receive something identifiable. Future taxpayers inherit an obligation they did not help create. 

This is a classic problem of time inconsistency. The action that may be responsible over the long term imposes short-term costs. The easiest short-term action makes the long-term problem worse. 

It is therefore always possible to argue that now is not the right moment. 

During a recession, fiscal restraint may weaken demand. During a recovery, leaders may not want to interrupt growth. During a security crisis, defense requirements take precedence. During an election, difficult fiscal choices appear politically impossible. When interest rates are low, borrowing seems inexpensive. When rates rise, the adjustment required becomes more painful. 

Unfortunately, politically convenient moments to act are rare. 

But postponement is itself a decision. It progressively reduces the room available to future governments. The  Congressional Budget Office projects that the federal deficit will reach approximately $1.9 trillion in 2026 and rise to $3.1 trillion by 2036. Rising interest costs account for an important part of that deterioration. 

The Government Accountability Office reports that net interest spending exceeded federal spending on national defense in 2025. Interest is expected to consume a growing share of federal resources in the years ahead. These payments finance decisions already made. They do not educate a child, maintain a bridge, fund new research, treat a patient, or equip a soldier. As they increase, they narrow the space available for current or future governing choices. 

The danger is therefore not only a dramatic fiscal crisis at some unknown point in the future. It is also a gradual loss of fiscal space: a reduced ability to invest, respond to shocks and pursue new opportunities. 

The question “Why now?” should not be answered by claiming that financial collapse is imminent. Such claims are difficult to sustain and easy to dismiss. A more credible answer is that every year of delay transfers more of the federal budget from choices about the future to payments for the past. 

From recognition to commitment 

The difficulty of answering “Why this? Why us? Why now?” helps explain why the debt remains closer to the symbolic agenda than the real one. 

This is not simply a communication failure. It is a governance capability problem (in keeping with the work of our colleagues Quinton Mayne, Jorrit de Jong and Fernando Fernandez-Monge referenced in the first blog and earlier here). 

• Having the data-analytic capability to address fiscal problems requires more than producing accurate fiscal numbers. It requires being able to use evidence to construct an intelligible and shared picture of the problem—one that reveals its scale and consequences without turning the data into another partisan weapon. 

• Having reflective-improvement capability to address fiscal problems requires creating space for all actors in the system to examine their assumptions and acknowledge the tensions and problems within their own positions (not just those of others). It asks whether political parties, interest groups, and citizens can recognize how their preferred policies have contributed to the aggregate outcome instead of just blaming those of others. 

• Having collaborative capability to address fiscal problems requires mechanisms through which all actors in the system can work across philosophical, political and social boundaries. They do not need to begin with an agreed solution. But they must develop sufficient common ground to accept shared responsibility and begin making choices together. 

The United States possesses extensive capacity in all these areas. It has fiscal data, expert analysts, legislative institutions, executive agencies, universities, think tanks, media organizations, and civic groups. What it has not demonstrated is the empowered ability to bring these resources together in a process that moves the debt from widespread concern to committed action. 

This second post examines that problem. Before asking how to reduce the deficit, we need to understand why a widely recognized danger has not become a sufficiently urgent, shared, and actionable problem. 

Which brings us back to the key questions: Why this? Why us? Why now? 

The inability to answer those questions may be one of the clearest signs that the United States is confronting not only a fiscal problem, but a fiscal-governance problem. 

Fifteen years ago, in article titled The (Il)logics of Federal Budgeting, and Why Crisis Must Come, I argued that the deeper problem was a set of conflicting logics about government and ourselves: we want limited government and low taxes, while also expecting government to provide an extensive range of benefits, protections, and services. That argument seems more relevant today than when I wrote it. 

Perhaps that is why the three questions remain so difficult. We are caught in a web of conflicting ideas about who we are and what we expect from government. We look into the fiscal mirror and see many things we value, but struggle to see ourselves—and our own responsibility for the choices involved. 

The next post will turn to the data. It will ask whether we can construct a common-enough account of how the fiscal position developed—one that recognizes crises and political choices without using the evidence to blame individual presidents or parties. 

Images are derived through ChatGPT.