David Walker, the former U.S. Comptroller General, is pressing President Trump, Congress, and the American public to confront a national debt approaching $40 trillion, and he wants a constitutional amendment to force the issue. Walker laid out his case on the Just the News, No Noise TV show, warning that without structural reform, an economic collapse is not a question of "if" but "when."
His argument is blunt: Congress cannot be trusted to discipline itself. Only a binding constitutional limit on debt as a share of GDP will restore fiscal sanity. And if lawmakers refuse to act, Walker says the states should haul them into court.
The pitch comes as Washington continues to spend at a pace that makes the early 2000s look restrained. In fiscal year 2003, the federal government ran what was then a record budget deficit of $374 billion, as Just the News reported. Today, the debt itself is more than a hundred times that single-year figure, and climbing.
Walker, who now serves as campaign chairman of a group called "50 Million People," outlined three specific actions he wants from the president. First, Trump should publicly endorse a constitutional amendment limiting debt as a percentage of the economy. Second, Trump should signal that he has no objection to states suing Congress for abandoning its fiscal responsibilities. Third, Trump should back the Fiscal Commission Act, Senate Bill 4012 in the 119th Congress, which would create a formal commission on fiscal responsibility and reform. That bill was introduced on March 5.
Walker framed the constitutional amendment as the only mechanism with teeth. In his words:
"One of the things that we clearly have to have is we need a constitutional amendment, because only a constitutional amendment can bind the Congress to return to fiscal sanity and sustainability."
The proposed amendment would require supermajority votes in Congress to exceed the debt-to-GDP limit. And Walker added a consequence for lawmakers who willfully violate it: disqualification from reelection.
"If there is a willful violation of this constitutional amendment, you can't stand for reelection," Walker said.
Sen. Rand Paul, the Kentucky Republican, has pushed a similar idea for years, restricting members of Congress from seeking reelection if they fail to balance the budget. Walker's proposal goes further by embedding the restriction in the Constitution itself.
Walker's indictment of Congress rests on a simple, verifiable record. Under the Constitution, Congress is required to pass all appropriations bills every year. Walker says lawmakers have managed to do that exactly four times in his lifetime. The last time was 1996.
"They've only done it four times in my lifetime. That is an F minus," he said.
That three-decade streak of failure is not a partisan problem. Walker pointed to the late Sen. Tom Coburn, the Oklahoma Republican, who made the same case in his 2012 book The Debt Bomb: A Bold Plan to Stop Washington from Bankrupting America. Coburn wrote that the nation would ultimately fall if it didn't change its fiscal course, and that the blame could not be laid at the feet of one party. Both Republicans and Democrats, Coburn argued, are "equally guilty." What drove the dysfunction, in Coburn's telling, was the human sin of greed, on both sides of the aisle.
With Congress fielding massive new spending requests on top of existing obligations, the trajectory Walker describes has only steepened.
Walker did not limit his warnings to abstract fiscal theory. He pointed to a concrete deadline bearing down on tens of millions of Americans: Social Security faces a projected 22 to 28 percent across-the-board benefit cut in late 2032 if Congress does not reform the program.
"Yet, Congress is doing nothing," Walker said.
That six-year window is short by legislative standards, especially for a program that touches nearly every American household. And the political incentives run in the wrong direction, fixing Social Security requires either benefit adjustments, revenue changes, or both, none of which make for easy campaign ads.
Walker noted that the last time the country was on a sound fiscal footing was around 2001, when the U.S. ran budget surpluses and actually paid down debt. He credited bipartisan work during the Clinton administration, welfare reform, defense spending adjustments, and other measures, with producing that brief window of responsibility.
"We went from deficits to surpluses. We paid down debts for two years," Walker said.
That era now feels like ancient history. The surpluses evaporated, the debt exploded, and no president or Congress since has come close to replicating the result. Meanwhile, stories of powerful figures dodging their own financial obligations only deepen public cynicism about whether anyone in Washington takes fiscal accountability seriously.
One of the more provocative elements of Walker's proposal is the idea that states should take Congress to court. Brian Walter, founder of Unity Above Self in America, echoed that call, arguing that states should sue Congress for "failing to discharge their constitutional duty under Article Five" of the Constitution.
Walter went further in his assessment of congressional behavior:
"When they act or vote in a way that does not serve the common good, merely serves their own reelection, they have violated their oath and are, by definition, corrupt."
Whether such a lawsuit would survive judicial scrutiny is an open question. Courts have historically been reluctant to wade into disputes between the political branches over the exercise of legislative power. But the argument reflects a growing frustration, shared by voters across the political spectrum, that Congress has effectively abandoned its most basic constitutional obligations.
Les Rubin, founder of Main Street Economics, added another dimension to the warning. Rubin stated that the United States will eventually reach a point where other countries simply refuse to buy its debt, leaving the government unable to pay its bills. That scenario, a sovereign debt crisis in the world's reserve currency, would dwarf any recession in living memory.
Walker himself put it in the starkest terms: failure to act will cause an inevitable collapse of the U.S. economy, leading to a global depression. The political class may treat that as alarmism. The math suggests otherwise.
In a political environment where dramatic institutional shake-ups dominate the headlines, the slow-motion fiscal crisis rarely commands front-page attention. That is precisely what Walker and his allies are trying to change.
Walker invoked Abraham Lincoln to explain why he believes a mass public campaign, not insider lobbying, is the only path forward. "As Lincoln said, with public support you can do anything, without it you can do nothing," Walker said. Then he added his own coda: "And by the way, Congress is very good at doing nothing."
The "50 Million People" campaign appears designed to build exactly that kind of grassroots pressure. Walker's theory is straightforward: if enough Americans understand the scale of the debt problem and the consequences of inaction, elected officials will have no choice but to act, or face voters who understand what a 25 percent Social Security cut actually means for their retirement.
Whether that theory holds up against the realities of modern political attention spans is another matter. Congress has proven remarkably skilled at avoiding hard fiscal choices for decades. Continuing resolutions, omnibus spending bills, and debt ceiling theatrics have replaced the basic work of annual appropriations. The last time lawmakers did their job on that front, all the way back in 1996, most current members of Congress were not yet in office.
The scale of the challenge is hard to overstate. A debt nearing $40 trillion, a Social Security system careening toward automatic cuts, and a Congress that hasn't completed its basic budgetary duties in thirty years, these are not abstract policy debates. They are the financial foundation under every American household, and the kind of slow-building crisis that rarely gets the urgency it deserves until the damage is already done.
Walker is right about one thing: Congress has earned its grade. The question is whether anyone in Washington cares enough to change it before the bill comes due, and this time, there won't be a continuing resolution to kick it down the road.
