Jing Pan

Fri, Jun 6, 2025, 12:45 PM7 min read

Moneywise and Yahoo Finance LLC may earn commission or revenue through links in the content below.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has a stark warning for Americans.

“Congress is making America bankrupt,” he wrote in a June 3 post on X.

The comment came as Musk reposted a chart from X account World of Statistics, showing U.S. budget deficits from 2000 to 2024 — and the numbers are sobering.

• Thanks to Jeff Bezos, you can now become a landlord for as little as $100 — and no, you don't have to deal with tenants or fix freezers. Here's how

• BlackRock CEO Larry Fink has an important message for the next wave of American retirees — here's how he says you can best weather the US retirement crisis

• Nervous about the stock market in 2025? Find out how you can access this $1B private real estate fund (with as little as $10)

In fiscal 2000, the federal government posted a $236 billion surplus, followed by a $128 billion surplus in 2001. (The chart didn't distinguish between deficits and surpluses, but those two years were surpluses, according to Federal Reserve data.)

Unfortunately, that was the last time Washington ran a budget in the black.

By 2002, the U.S. had fallen into a $158 billion deficit — spending more than it collected in revenue. The gap only widened in the years that followed, reaching $1.29 trillion in 2010 and ballooning to $3.13 trillion in 2020.

For fiscal 2024, the U.S. government spent $6.75 trillion while taking in $4.92 trillion, resulting in a $1.83 trillion deficit.

Musk has long criticized excess government spending, and he recently took aim at President Donald Trump’s signature budget bill.

“This massive, outrageous, pork-filled Congressional spending bill is a disgusting abomination,” Musk wrote on X. “Shame on those who voted for it: You know you did wrong.”

He also warned that the bill could push the federal deficit to $2.5 trillion and saddle Americans with “crushingly unsustainable debt.”

Years of deficit spending have added up: U.S. national debt now stands at more than $36 trillion — and continues to climb.

Whether America can technically go bankrupt is a complicated question because the federal government cannot file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization.

Instead, Congress would have to decide to let the federal government default on its debt, otherwise it can keep borrowing as long as there is demand from investors for government bonds.

“Technically speaking, the government can’t go bankrupt because it only promised to hand over a certain number of dollars; it didn’t promise what the value of those dollars would be. Because the value of the dollars was never specified, the government can print enough to render the dollars nearly worthless. To the rest of us, the effect is the same as the government going bankrupt,” wrote the co-hosts of podcast Words & Numbers back in 2016.