While those actions contributed significantly to the national debt, there are other events that also caused substantial deficits. The national debt has increased from $5.8 trillion in 2001 to $33 trillion in 2023, according to the Treasury Department.

Following the 2008 financial crisis, former President Barack Obama pushed Congress to approve of a nearly $800 billion package of tax cuts and stimulus spending in 2009 to boost the economy’s recovery, according to The New York Times. In 2020, former President Donald Trump responded to a recession caused by the COVID-19 pandemic by approving aid packages totaling over $3 trillion which included direct stimulus checks, the outlet reported.

Ben Ritz, the director of Progressive Policy Institute’s Center for Funding America’s Future, told Check Your Fact that “there are three primary causes for the debt increasing” since 2001.

“The national debt can be attributed to the tax cuts made by Bush, the 2008 financial crisis and stimulus measures enacted in response to COVID-19,” Ritz said. “Debt as a percentage of gross domestic product today would roughly be the same level as it was in 2000 had these three things not happened.”

Ritz said that “future debt accumulation” is primarily caused by social programs such as Medicare and Social Security.

“That debt is primarily caused by health-care and retirement programs, namely Medicare and Social Security, growing faster than our economy as the population ages. Although it is technically correct that projections showed revenue keeping pace with this spending growth before most of the Bush Tax Cuts were made permanent, those projections depended on an assumption that revenues would be allowed to rise on autopilot to unprecedented levels as a percent of national income,” Ritz said.

A Khanna spokesperson directed Check Your Fact to an article by the Center for American Progress that attributed the debt in part to tax cuts made during the Bush and Trump administrations.

“These tax cuts have added $10 trillion to the debt since their enactment and are responsible for 57 percent of the increase in the debt ratio since 2001, and more than 90 percent of the increase in the debt ratio if the one-time costs of bills responding to COVID-19 and the Great Recession are excluded,” the article reads.

The Khanna spokesperson also cited a Harvard paper from Linda Bilmes, a senior lecturer in public policy at Harvard University, about the cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Bilmes writes that taken together, the Iraq and Afghanistan conflict were the most expensive wars in US history – totaling somewhere between $4 to $6 trillion.

“He does have a point when George Bush’s foreign wars. That was an absolute disaster, not just in terms of foreign policy, but financially. We essentially wasted a trillion dollars, at least a trillion dollars. So that part of the narrative, you can say at least, is true,” Antoni said.