What Stephen Miller gets wrong about debt and immigration

The U.S. national debt grew past 100% of gross domestic product last month, putting the country on the path to beat the record of 106% of GDP set in 1946, coming out of World War II. That record is on pace to shatter around 2029, just as Donald Trump‘s presidency is ending, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates. 

Deputy White House Chief of Staff Stephen Miller has identified a culprit for what might otherwise be a grim legacy, he said at a Trump administration anti-fraud event Tuesday.

“I believe based on what I’ve seen and what I’ve heard is that we could balance the federal budget if the only dollars that went out of the Treasury went to individuals who were properly lawfully correctly eligible to receive them,” Miller said. 

Miller’s figures far overstate the federal government’s published estimates for misspent funds, and overlook that immigrants generally help improve, not worsen, the budget deficit. But the problem isn’t just misleading math. The Trump administration’s inability to take the deficit seriously is worsening Americans’ affordability crisis today and threatening a debt crisis down the road. The deficit is the difference between what the federal government takes in from taxes and other revenue and what it spends on. That adds to the cumulative federal debt.

Miller was building on his prior comments that put the nation’s spending problems at the feet of immigrants who are in the U.S. illegally, don’t buy into the American system, or both. Stolen or otherwise misappropriated benefits have “fleeced” the taxpayer of hundreds of billions of dollars, Miller said Tuesday, or even trillions, as he put it in March. 

“The extraction of wealth from American taxpayers to people who don’t belong here is the primary cause of the national debt,” Miller said alongside the president on March 16.

The White House didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on Miller’s remarks.

The national debt stands at $31.4 trillion. Presidents and members of Congress from both parties have committed to unbalanced spending in the decades since President Bill Clinton briefly managed to balance the budget in the 1990s. But recent years have seen a sharp acceleration of debt-financed spending. Trump slashed taxes in his first term, only to begin a Covid spending frenzy that culminated in a vast stimulus package under President Joe Biden. That spending staved off a recession at the cost of overheating the economy, contributing to the inflation that still plagues Americans. 

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said before being picked for that job that he wanted Trump to get the deficit to less than 4% of GDP by the end of his term. There is still time, but the trajectory doesn’t look good. The deficit ran to 5.8% of…