You should leave Social Security out of the calculations. It's supposed to be a self-funding program that has no impact on budget balance. That accounts for ~$0.5 trillion of the growth since 2020.

Another ~$0.5 trillion is from higher interest payments.

A large fraction of the budget consists of wages and actual spending. Inflation is 25–30% since 2020.

Then there is healthcare spending, which can be expected to grow faster than inflation, as the population is growing older.

The US is basically running into the same issues as European welfare states. While government spending remains qualitatively the same, demographic changes make it grow faster than tax revenue. Those who couldn't maintain a balanced budget in the past are finding the situation particularly difficult. In some sense, the situation is even worse in the US. Healthcare (old age spending) is particularly expensive, while individuals have greater responsibility for childhood expenses.

> Another ~$0.5 trillion is from higher interest payments. A large fraction of the budget consists of wages and actual spending. Inflation is 25–30% since 2020.

If we account for only these two things, it is catastrophic.

1. Interest on the debt when we don’t have a balanced budget to stop growing that debt will spiral out of control.

2. When any part of that spending which is creating inflation already must then increase to pay for the inflation that it is causing, we are circling the drain. That is a death spiral.

We need extreme, Javier Milei level cuts to the federal government.