Fact Check: Did Joe Biden Bring Down National Debt by $1.7 Trillion?

A tense standoff between the White House and House Republicans on increasing the debt ceiling persists, with fears the U.S. may default on its debt in only a few weeks' time unless an agreement is reached.

With the debt totaling over $31.5 trillion, many members of the GOP-dominated House of Representatives argue that raising the debt ceiling without budget cuts would be irresponsible.

Amid this, claims have appeared on social media suggesting that President Joe Biden laid claim to reducing the national debt.

The Claim

A tweet by RNC Research, posted on May 9, 2023 and viewed 300,000 times, stated that President Joe Biden had lied about reducing the national debt by $1.7 trillion.

The tweet stated: "BIDEN: 'In my first two years, I reduced the debt by $1.7 trillion.'

"That's a complete lie. Biden has not decreased the $31+ trillion national debt."

A video of Biden was attached to the tweet, in which he said: "I might note parenthetically: In my first two years, I reduced the debt by $1.7 trillion. No President has ever done that."

The Facts

The bill House Republicans passed last month on a party-line vote would raise the debt ceiling but also slash federal spending, including cuts to some of Biden's health and climate programs.

Amid the partisan standoff, a growing number of senators from both parties have also been discussing the possibility of Biden invoking a clause in the 14th Amendment that some legal scholars say allows the president to raise the debt ceiling without congressional approval.

The national debt has increased by around $3.5 trillion under the Biden administration, as data from Statista shows, currently standing at $31.46 trillion. Year-on-year the debt has never decreased since 1957, according to Treasury data.

The $1.7 trillion figure, in fact, refers to a reduction in the national deficit between fiscal years 2020 to 2022.

Some have questioned how far Biden should take credit for this; as noted by PolitiFact, while the deficit has decreased under Biden, most of that was because of expiring emergency pandemic spending.

The $1.7 trillion debt claim has been previously debunked by a number of media outlets including CNN and Factcheck.org.

That alone would make the president's claim false. However, RNC Research (managed by the Republican National Committee) only highlights one part of the clip from the White House press conference.

Shortly after, Biden went on to attribute the $1.7 trillion figure to the deficit, a figure corroborated by Treasury reporting.

"As I said, I've already cut the deficit by $1.7 trillion in my first two years in office," he said.

Although not strictly a correction of what he said before (more of an alteration), and certainly confusing, RNC Research did not include this part of the speech.

A spokesman for RNC Research said: "Those are Biden's words not ours," pointing to other instances where the president conflated debt and deficit, and also questioning how far Biden should be credited with his $1.7 trillion deficit claim.

The spokesman added: "If Biden doesn't want to be called a liar, perhaps he should start telling the truth."

In this context, it doesn't appear that the president is knowingly pursuing a falsehood, more that he misquotes and then corrects himself at a later point. Without this context, however, it makes it appear that he is repeating a mistruth.

Clearly, with national debt the center of U.S. public conversation, it would have been at the very least unwise for him to make such an easily refutable claim, let alone one which he has incorrectly made before.

Newsweek has contacted the White House for comment.

The Ruling

Misleading material.

The Biden administration has not reduced the national debt by $1.7 trillion. It has increased by about $3.5 trillion during Biden's term in office. The national debt has not decreased year-on-year since the late 1950s.

The $1.7 trillion figure refers to a reduction in the deficit realized between fiscal year 2020 and 2022.

However, the clip shared on Twitter which highlighted this claim omitted a correction of sorts shortly after, where Biden said the $1.7 trillion reduction was from the deficit, not the debt.

FACT CHECK BY Newsweek's Fact Check team