Scott Bessent on the national debt: ‘There’s nothing magic about the $40 trillion number’

The U.S. national debt crossed $40 trillion for the first time this week, but Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent wants Americans—and markets—to shrug it off.

“There’s nothing magic about the $40 trillion number,” Bessent told CNBC ‘s Sara Eisen in an exclusive interview on Squawk on the Street Thursday.

“And we can grow our way out of that.” The remark, delivered with the same even cadence he’s used to talk down bond-market jitters all year, was Bessent’s clearest attempt yet to reframe a debt milestone that has alarmed economists and fueled a selloff in long-dated Treasurys.

The gross national debt crossed the $40 trillion mark, according to Treasury Department data, just five months after hitting $39 trillion in March.

Bessent’s comments came a day after the Treasury said it would at least double the size of its buyback operations for longer-dated securities—from a maximum of $2 billion per operation to “at least” $4 billion—in a bid to shore up liquidity in a bond market he described as thinly traded and, in his view, mispriced.

The change takes effect Sept.

9 and applies through Nov.

4, covering the 10-to-20-year and 20-to-30-year sectors that have faced what CNBC has called a “buyers’ strike” since late June.

“We believe that there are many underlying factors in turn that the market is not looking at, and we are going to make a market… in these,” Bessent said.

“I would note that it could be more than the $4 billion per issue.” The fundamentals argument Bessent’s core pitch is the deficit is smaller than it looks, and the money the government is “losing” isn’t being lost at all.

He said the U.S. ran a fiscal consolidation in calendar year 2025, with the deficit landing around 5.7% of GDP.

Part of what has inflated the headline deficit, he argued, are one-time tariff refunds that won’t recur: 2026 tariff income, he said, should roughly match 2025 levels as U.S.

Trade Representative Jamieson Greer reimplements duties through the Section 301 process.

The other major drag on revenue, he said, is the cost of letting companies immediately expense new factories, equipment, and farm structures.