As the United States’ gross national debt recently surged past the $38 trillion mark, commentators hastened to ring alarm bells. And surely the figure is eye-popping. But as someone who was elected to the U.S. Congress in 1984 on the very platform of fiscal responsibility—and who was the first practicing CPA ever elected to Congress—I want to sound a more fundamental warning: the number may be much less meaningful than meets the eye. We will never truly know what the national debt really is, or tackle it effectively, unless we adopt full-GAAP accounting at the federal level.
An old warning grows more urgent
When I ran for Congress, it was nearly a long-shot race. No one expected the first practicing CPA to win, but I did—and I did so on the idea that the national books of the U.S. government were not being kept in a transparent, modern accounting framework. I argued then—just as I argue now—that unless we apply Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP), we are flying blind.
That same conviction led me to author the Chief Financial Officers (CFO) Act of 1990, which President George H. W. Bush signed into law. The Act was meant to bring professional accounting, auditing, and financial reporting standards—based on GAAP—into every major federal agency. Unfortunately, more than three decades later, its full promise has yet to be realized. Much like our incomplete debt accounting, the CFO Act itself remains only partially implemented, and until it is fully carried out, Congress and the public still lack a reliable picture of our government’s true fiscal condition.
