WASHINGTON, July 11 — The man who runs the numbers on America’s fiscal future is sitting in an office that smells of old paper and fresh coffee, staring at a chart that climbs like a fever line. Phillip Swagel, director of the Congressional Budget Office, has spent the last seven years trying to tell Congress what the math says — and the math, right now, is not pretty. Swagel, 61, took the helm of the CBO on June 3, 2019, for what was supposed to be a four-year term.
He was reappointed in 2023. That means he has now served through two administrations, a pandemic that blew a hole in the federal balance sheet, and an interest-rate cycle that has made the national debt vastly more expensive to carry.
On the ground here at the CBO’s offices on Second Street, staff describe a director who reads every page of every report before it goes out — a hands-on economist who still teaches at the University of Maryland School of Public Policy when he can. The numbers he has overseen are stark. In March 2024, under Swagel’s leadership, the CBO released its Long-Term Budget Outlook.
The headline projection: federal debt reaching 166% of GDP by 2054. That is not a distant abstraction — it is a line that, if current law holds, keeps climbing.
Swagel has testified before House and Senate committees on the federal budget and debt outlook, and in those hearings he has been blunt about what is driving the trend.
The Interest Rate Squeeze
Swagel has emphasized the role of rising interest rates in increasing net interest costs. This is the mechanism that keeps budget hawks awake at night: as the Federal Reserve raised rates to fight inflation, the cost of servicing the existing national debt shot up. The CBO’s projections show interest payments consuming a growing share of federal revenue — money that could go to defense, infrastructure, or entitlement programs instead goes to bondholders.
Swagel, in his testimony, has framed this not as a crisis tomorrow but as a slow squeeze that narrows choices every year. Before the CBO, Swagel served as Assistant Secretary for Economic Policy at the Treasury Department from 2006 to 2009 under President George W.
Bush. That was the era of the financial crisis, when Treasury was scrambling to stabilize the banking system. Swagel was in the room for some of those decisions.
He holds a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University, earned in 1992. Born in 1965, he came of age as an economist during the Great Moderation — the period of stable growth and low inflation that now feels like a distant memory.
The Man Behind the Projections
By nightfall, the CBO building is quiet, but the work continues. Swagel’s team is already modeling the next Long-Term Budget Outlook, due out in 2025. The political landscape has shifted since the 2024 election — President Donald Trump is back in the White House, with Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio in the administration.
But the CBO’s mandate is nonpartisan: it scores legislation, projects deficits, and tells Congress what the bills will cost, regardless of who is in power. Swagel himself is a professor at the University of Maryland School of Public Policy, a role he has maintained alongside his CBO duties.
Colleagues describe him as a careful economist who does not grandstand. When he testifies, he reads from prepared remarks, answers questions with precision, and does not stray into advocacy. That discipline has served him well in an era when the budget has become a political football.
The scene in Washington is one of competing pressures. The debt is rising.
Interest rates, while off their peaks, remain elevated. The aging population is driving up spending on Social Security and Medicare. Swagel’s job is to put numbers on all of it — to tell Congress, in cold hard figures, what the future looks like if nothing changes.
So far, the answer has been: expensive.
