The Bill Nobody Wants to Talk About: Solving the Fiscal Crisis

Thirty-nine trillion dollars.

That is what this country owes as of May 2026. It is not a number that fits easily in the human mind. It is larger than the entire United States economy. It is growing at approximately $7.2 billion every single day. The interest we pay on it — just the interest — now exceeds $1 trillion per year, which means it costs more to carry our debt than we spend on Medicaid, more than we spend on education, and more than the entire defense budget cost twenty years ago.

Nobody in Washington wants to have this conversation honestly. Republicans want to cut spending but refuse to touch the tax cuts that drain revenue. Democrats want to protect programs but resist the structural reforms that would make them sustainable. Both parties have been in charge for decades and the debt has gone one direction the entire time. The result is a fiscal crisis that is no longer theoretical. It is present, compounding, and accelerating — and the people who will spend their lives managing it are the families here at home who had no part in creating it.

I am going to talk about it honestly. The alternative is to keep pretending the problem does not exist until it becomes a catastrophe that no one can manage.

First, let us understand who we actually owe this money to.

The $39 trillion breaks into two categories. About $7.7 trillion is intragovernmental debt — money the federal government borrowed from itself, primarily from the Social Security and Medicare trust funds. Think of it as the government raiding its own savings accounts for decades and leaving IOUs. The remaining $31.3 trillion is held by outside parties.

Of that external debt, roughly half is held by American institutions and investors — banks, pension funds, mutual funds, and individual Americans who own Treasury bonds. When we pay interest on that portion, the money stays in the American economy. The other half is more complicated. Foreign governments and investors hold approximately $9.3 trillion in U.S. debt. Japan holds about $1.2 trillion. The United Kingdom holds nearly $900 billion. China holds approximately $800 billion. Every interest payment to those creditors is money leaving this country. More importantly, that debt gives foreign governments economic leverage over American policy. That is not a hypothetical concern. That is a structural national security vulnerability that neither party has addressed seriously.

The interest problem is the crisis inside the crisis.

At current rates, the United States pays roughly $2.89 billion in interest every single day. That annual $1 trillion-plus interest bill is not buying anything. It is not building roads or funding schools or paying doctors. It is the cost of having borrowed money for decades without ever getting serious about paying it back. The problem compounds. As interest rates rose over the last several years, the cost of carrying existing debt increased automatically. The CBO projects that net interest payments will consume nearly 15 percent of all federal spending through the end of the decade. Every dollar spent on interest is a dollar not spent on the things this country actually needs.

The political class talks about the debt in the abstract. I want to make it concrete. Every working family in America is effectively co-signing a loan they did not take out, for purchases they did not make, at interest rates they cannot control. The debt was built by both parties across four administrations. The families here at home are the ones who will pay it — in the form of reduced services, higher taxes, a weaker dollar, and an economy increasingly constrained by the cost of carrying the past.

The Pentagon is the place this conversation has to start.

The Department of Defense has failed its own financial audit six consecutive times. Not a partial audit. A full audit. The largest single budget item in the federal government cannot account for trillions of dollars in assets and expenditures. Every private company, every nonprofit, every person who has ever applied for a mortgage is held to a higher standard of financial accountability than the Pentagon. Congress has continued to increase its budget anyway.

The reporting on Secretary Hegseth’s tenure made this concrete in a way that should outrage every taxpayer. Approximately $100 billion in spending categorized under defense accounts was allocated to luxury items, non-defense purposes, and expenditures that have nothing to do with national security. Private planes. Lobster dinners. Golden flutes. Meanwhile, the same administration cut food assistance from working families and children. That is not a fiscal policy. That is a moral failure with a budget line.

The use-it-or-lose-it budget culture inside federal agencies makes this worse. When departments do not spend their entire allocation in a fiscal year, their budget is cut the following year. The rational response to this incentive structure is to spend everything, on anything, before the deadline — which is exactly what happens across the federal government every September. Billions of dollars are spent not because the spending is needed but because the budget system punishes efficiency and rewards waste. This is not unique to defense. It runs through every agency. It is a structural problem that both parties have accepted as a cost of doing business for decades.

Fixing it requires changing the incentive. Agencies that return unspent funds should be rewarded, not penalized. Departments that demonstrate savings should receive a portion of those savings for priority investments of their choosing. The system should create a culture of stewardship instead of a culture of consumption.

The revenue side of the equation is equally honest.

The debt was built partly by spending more than we take in. It was built equally by decisions to reduce what we take in without reducing what we spend. The 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act added approximately $1.9 trillion to the deficit over ten years. The Big Beautiful Bill made those cuts permanent and added more, pushing the 10-year deficit impact past $3.4 trillion. These were not funded by spending reductions. They were borrowed. Every dollar of tax cut that is not offset by spending reduction is a dollar added to the debt that future generations will service.

The honest fiscal position is this: you cannot solve a $39 trillion debt problem by cutting spending alone. You cannot solve it by raising taxes alone. You need both — intelligent spending discipline and a revenue base that is broad, fair, and adequate to fund what the country has committed to providing. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.

Here are the solutions I will push for in Congress. They are not theoretical. They are proven, grounded in evidence, and ready for legislative action.

The first is a full, independent Pentagon audit with binding accountability. Every dollar. Every contract. Every asset. Audited by an independent body with the authority to claw back misspent funds and refer cases of fraud for prosecution. The Pentagon’s budget should not be immune from the same accountability standards applied to every other institution in America. Any representative who votes against a defense audit is protecting waste, not national security.

The second is reforming the use-it-or-lose-it budget system across all federal agencies. Departments that return unspent funds should be rewarded with a portion of those savings for priority reinvestment. The current system creates perverse incentives for wasteful spending. Changing it does not require cutting budgets. It requires changing how efficiency is treated.

The third is a United States Sovereign Wealth Fund, modeled on what Norway, Canada, and Singapore have built. The concept is straightforward: instead of paying down debt only through spending cuts and tax increases, the federal government identifies real revenue streams — royalties from federal lands, offshore drilling rights, spectrum license fees, strategic asset monetization — and directs those revenues into a professionally managed, publicly accountable investment fund. Over time, the returns from that fund contribute to debt reduction. Norway’s fund, built on oil revenues, now holds nearly $2 trillion in assets. The United States has the largest balance sheet of federal assets in the world. We are leaving enormous value on the table by not managing it strategically.

The fourth is restructuring how we handle foreign-held debt. Rather than paying pure cash interest to foreign creditors, the United States should negotiate bilateral agreements where interest obligations are credited toward joint infrastructure investment, technology commitments, or trade concessions on American terms. Debt-for-investment swaps exist internationally. The structure is precedented. What has been missing is the political will to pursue it at scale. Converting cash interest outflows to investment obligations reduces the money leaving the country while giving us leverage in the relationship.

The fifth is pay-as-you-go as a binding legislative requirement. Any new spending must identify its funding source before it passes. Any new tax cut must identify what it costs before it is enacted. The era of borrowing for everything and calling it a plan has to end somewhere. A pay-as-you-go rule does not balance the budget overnight. It stops the bleeding while the structural reforms take hold.

The sixth is a serious, nonpartisan review of corporate tax structures. The effective corporate tax rate in the United States, after deductions, loopholes, offshore arrangements, and tax incentives, is significantly below the statutory rate for most large companies. Small businesses — the backbone of this district — do not have the legal and accounting infrastructure to access most of those benefits. They pay closer to full rate. A tax structure that is more favorable to the largest multinationals than to the small business owner in our community is not a competitive advantage for America. It is a transfer of burden from the most powerful to the most vulnerable.

What strong national defense actually requires.

I want to be clear on something that is often misunderstood about this position. Calling for financial accountability in defense spending is not a call to weaken our military. It is the opposite. A military whose budget cannot be audited is a military that cannot be trusted to allocate resources to actual readiness. A defense establishment that spends $100 billion on items unrelated to national security is one that has less money for the training, equipment, and support that the men and women in uniform actually need. Accountability serves national security. Waste undermines it.

We are in a complicated geopolitical moment. Iran, China, Russia, and regional instability across multiple theaters represent real and present threats. This is not the time to weaken our defense posture. It is the time to ensure that every defense dollar is actually spent on defense, and that the institution entrusted with our security is held to the same standards of accountability we apply to everyone else.

The honest bottom line.

America’s fiscal crisis is real, urgent, and structurally worsening. It was built by both parties over decades through a combination of overspending, undertaxing, and a political culture that rewards short-term decisions and defers long-term consequences. The families here at home are the long-term consequence. They did not create this problem. They will absorb it.

An Independent voice in Congress can say what the two parties cannot: every real solution requires spending discipline, structural revenue reform, and smarter financial management — and most likely all three at once. The strategies I have outlined are not radical. They are proven, precedented, and ready for serious legislative action. What they require is a representative willing to put the long-term interest of working families above the short-term interest of donors and political bases.

That is what I am running to do.

The primary is June 2nd. Your ballot is in your hands.

With fiscal honesty and commitment to the long game --
Nina Linh
Independent Candidate, CA-40