But most fiscal hawks and many economists argue that growing gross domestic product enough to dig out of the debt hole is not a feasible solution and that a fiscal crisis looms if the government doesn’t enact reforms to lower spending or raise revenues.

“You have to keep your nominal GDP growing ahead of your servicing costs, so that you can stabilize the debt … but you can’t grow your way out of total debt reduction,” former Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (R-OH) told the Washington Examiner during an interview.

Ryan said that Bessent is correct that the fiscal problems cannot be fixed without growth, but that reforms are also needed for entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare.

“There’s no getting around that,” the former speaker and longtime fiscal hawk said.

Former Rep. Carolyn Bourdeaux, now the executive director of the Concord Coalition, which focuses on balancing the budget, told the Washington Examiner that, at this stage in the game, increasing economic growth enough to offset the government’s deficits is not feasible. Instead, she said, revenue increases and spending cuts are needed to balance the budget.

“There’s zero chance we’re going to be able to grow our way out of this right now, given the current deficits that we run,” said Bourdeaux, a Georgia Democrat.

This month, the Treasury Department confirmed a $1.8 trillion deficit in the first 10 months of fiscal 2026.

The overall national debt first crossed the $1 trillion mark in 1981, but lawmakers of both parties have done little to reduce debt and deficits since the temporary run of balanced budgets from fiscal 1998 through fiscal 2001.

Budget experts say the mismatch between federal spending and revenues precludes balancing the budget through economic growth.

Brett Loper, the executive vice president for policy at the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, a nonprofit organization focused on reducing federal deficits, said that in order to grow the U.S. out of its debt over the next decade, the economy would have to experience gangbusters 4.3% growth every single year.

According to the group’s modeling, the economy has never matched that 4.3% pace for a sustained period. For instance, last year the economy grew at 2.1%, and the year before, GDP expanded at a 2.8% pace.

Loper pointed out that three of the most authoritative forecasters — the Congressional Budget Office, the Federal Reserve, and the Blue Chip survey of forecasters — are all forecasting 2% or below annual growth for the next decade.

Essentially, absent other changes, economic growth would need to somehow double every single year from projected levels to achieve what Bessent is calling for.

Loper said that such a pattern of growth is “all but unattainable.”

“You know, we haven’t had annual productivity growth reach anything like that for any sustained period of time since World War II,” he said.

And there are also headwinds to faster growth, Loper said, such as the falling worker-to-retiree ratio, the existing volume of debt, and the interest payments the government is already making on it.

“So you have all these headwinds that would make this difficult, and no historical precedent for it getting to the rate that would be needed to grow our way out,” he said.

Still, the need for growth cannot be downplayed. Caleb Quakenbush, director of fiscal policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center, said that the last time the U.S. had debt at this level was in the wake of World War II.

“Economic growth was a big part of us moving out of that,” Quakenbush said.

But the circumstances now aren’t the same, he said.

“We have an aging population that’s putting a lot of pressure, upward pressure on our entitlement programs, Social Security, Medicare, healthcare,” Quakenbush said. “[Artificial intelligence] is still a huge question mark in terms of what its long-run impact on economic growth is going to be.”

Bourdeaux said that some things that would help with the debt situation — in addition to economic growth — would be the administration or lawmakers forming a bipartisan fiscal commission. She also said that it would be beneficial for the White House to include a plan to eliminate the deficit in its annual budget proposal.

“I would love to see a series of plans like that, that the president starts to put on the table and starts to close the gap,” she said. “And I think that would definitely help reassure the bond market that there’s actually going to be a push to try to resolve the problem.”

BOND MARKET SHRUGS OFF TREASURY INTERVENTION, WITH YIELDS REBOUNDING

Quakenbush said his group hopes that policymakers will tackle this challenge in a bipartisan manner and work to halve deficits. That would likely require raising enough revenues and making benefit adjustments to entitlement programs to right the ship.

“And I think what that does is it sends an important signal to our lenders out there that the government is actually serious about tackling its fiscal imbalances, and so I think that could ease some of the pressure in the bond markets on our debt, and it also gives people kind of the certainty to plan.”