Net interest on the federal debt is on pace to cross $1 trillion this fiscal year, more than the Pentagon spends, a gap the Congressional Budget Office says holds every year from 2025 through 2035 (CBO, 2025). And on the CBO’s own current baseline, the boring one, no crisis, no shock, no recession assumed, debt held by the public breaks the record set in 1946 at the height of World War II by fiscal year 2030 (CBO, 2026). That’s roughly four years out. Whatever actually fixes this needs to already be running by then, not still working its way through committee.

Criticism is the easy half of the job. In Treasury Buybacks: A Colossal Failure in the Making, the argument was that Scott Bessent’s expanded buyback program can’t fix what’s actually wrong, and that piece’s own worst-case scenario put a full-blown debt crisis at 2028. That timeline isn’t a scare tactic pulled from nowhere. It’s two years ahead of the CBO’s calm, no-drama baseline for breaking an 80-year-old record. The gap between “worst case” and “base case” has nearly closed. That piece ended with a gesture at “fiscal discipline: spending cuts, tax reform, monetary coordination.” True, but vague, and vague is exactly the kind of promise Congress has broken every year since Bill Clinton left office. If the diagnosis is that Washington won’t discipline itself voluntarily, the prescription can’t be another appeal to voluntary discipline delivered on a deadline nobody’s actually keeping. It has to be a rule that works even when nobody feels like following it, and it has to start now.

That rule already exists. Switzerland has been running one since 2003. The United States has tried to copy it, in a bill that’s been sitting in Congress, unpassed, since 2023.

The Clock Is Already Running

This isn’t a distant hypothetical. Net interest hit a near-record 3.2 percent of GDP in 2025, is set to eclipse that record in 2026, and is projected to climb from $881 billion in 2024 to $2.1 trillion by 2036 (CBO, 2025). Interest has already passed Social Security to become, functionally, the government’s second-largest bill, and it’s on track to exceed all discretionary spending, defense and everything else combined, by 2038 (CBO, 2025). None of that requires a crisis to happen. It’s what’s already baked into current law.

The debt-to-GDP figure is worse than it sounds precisely because nothing dramatic has to occur for it to get there. CBO’s February 2026 outlook has debt held by the public reaching 107.7 percent of GDP in fiscal year 2030, above the 106.1 percent the country hit in 1946 paying for the Second World War (CBO, 2026). The United States has never carried more debt relative to its economy than it did finishing that war. It is on pace to carry more than that within the current presidential term after next, without a war, a depression, or a pandemic required to get there.

Every year spent debating whether to act is a year that comes off a shrinking runway.

What Actually Failed Before

Washington has tried fiscal rules twice in living memory, and it’s worth being honest about why both fell short, because the debt brake only makes sense in contrast.

Statutory PAYGO, revived under President Obama in 2010, requires that new mandatory spending or tax cuts not add to the deficit over a six- or eleven-year window. In practice, Congress waives it routinely, on a bipartisan basis, whenever a bill is popular enough to want passed anyway.

The Budget Control Act of 2011 was tougher: hard caps on discretionary spending, enforced by across-the-board sequestration if Congress blew through them. The Congressional Research Service’s own assessment is fair: sequestration worked “as an effective backstop and modest budgetary offset,” but it never restrained the deficit broadly, because it only touched discretionary spending, applied its cuts blindly across defense and domestic programs alike, and got renegotiated and raised in nearly every subsequent budget deal.

Both rules share the same structural flaw. They are statutes, passed by a simple majority, waivable by a simple majority, in a legislature that faces reelection every two years. A rule that can be turned off by the same people it’s supposed to restrain isn’t a rule. It’s a suggestion with better branding, and Washington has now spent sixteen years proving it.

How Switzerland Built One That Sticks

The Swiss debt brake, or Schuldenbremse, was approved by constitutional referendum in 2001, with 85 percent of voters in favor, and took effect in 2003 (Avenir Suisse, n.d.). Four features make it different from anything Washington has tried:

  • A cyclically-adjusted expenditure ceiling. Federal spending in a given year is capped at expected revenue, multiplied by a factor tied to the output gap. In boom years the ceiling tightens and the government runs a surplus; in recessions it loosens automatically and deficits are allowed without a vote (Conference Board, 2024).
  • A compensation account. Every deviation from the ceiling is tracked. If the account accumulates a shortfall greater than 6 percent of prior spending, it must be cleared within three years, so slippage can’t compound indefinitely (Conference Board, 2024).
  • An escape hatch that costs something. Parliament can approve extraordinary spending for a real crisis (a pandemic, a natural disaster) but only by qualified majority, and the money is booked to a separate amortization account that has to be paid back within six years out of ordinary surpluses (Conference Board, 2024).
  • A constitutional floor. Because the rule is written into the constitution rather than an ordinary statute, undoing it takes another referendum, not a budget deal cut at 2 a.m.

The results are the part that should embarrass Washington. Switzerland’s federal debt-to-GDP ratio fell from 25.3 percent in 2003 to 13.5 percent in 2019, with gross federal debt dropping from a peak of roughly CHF 130 billion in 2005 to under CHF 100 billion in 2019 (Conference Board, 2024). It did this while still running deficits during the 2008 financial crisis and the pandemic, exactly as designed. The brake was never austerity by another name. It was a ceiling that moves with the economy instead of with the electoral calendar, and every good year it ran built the reserve that paid for the bad ones.

That last point matters more than it looks. A cyclical rule only works if it’s already in place before the next downturn arrives, because that’s when it needs a bank of past surpluses to draw against. Nobody gets to schedule the next recession. The later this starts, the fewer good years are left to build the cushion the mechanism depends on.

The Bill Already Sitting in Congress

Congress doesn’t need to invent this. In 2023, then-Senator Mike Braun of Indiana introduced the Responsible Budget Targets Act (S. 772), modeled explicitly on the Swiss rule: it would move the federal budget toward balance over the business cycle rather than every single year, and permit emergency spending only alongside a mandatory schedule of future offsets (Conference Board, 2024). Braun is now governor of Indiana, and the bill went nowhere. Three years of runway are already gone. The mechanism is still sitting there, drafted and scored, waiting for a sponsor willing to spend the next three differently.

It would need real adaptation to work here. Switzerland’s brake was built for a budget where discretionary spending is the dominant lever; in the United States, entitlements and interest are the drivers of the debt, so a rule that doesn’t eventually reach Social Security, Medicare, and the tax code is capping the wrong number. And the Swiss route to permanence, a binding referendum, has no equivalent in a country where amending the Constitution requires two-thirds of both chambers and three-quarters of the states. A realistic American version starts as a statute like the Responsible Budget Targets Act, with a supermajority requirement to waive it, and treats full constitutional entrenchment as a later, harder-won step rather than a precondition for starting.

Why This Beats a Buyback

Line up the debt brake against the three failures the buyback piece identified, and it answers each one directly instead of gesturing past it.

Too small to matter? A buyback of a few billion dollars a month is a rounding error against a $32 trillion market. A cyclically-adjusted expenditure ceiling operates on the entire federal budget, the actual scale of the actual problem, on the same clock the CBO is already running.

Increases long-term risk? Bond markets don’t lower yields because the Treasury bought back some paper; they lower yields when a borrower makes a credible commitment to solvency. A constitutional or near-constitutional spending rule is precisely the kind of commitment device that a discretionary buyback program, by definition, cannot be, and credibility is worth more the closer the calendar gets to 2030.

Moral hazard? This is the one the debt brake was built to solve. The buyback program’s core failure is that it lets Congress avoid discipline by having someone else absorb the consequences. A debt brake removes the choice. Nobody has to be brave enough to vote for austerity in a recession, because the rule already decided the boom-year surplus that pays for it, years in advance, without asking anyone’s permission in the moment.

None of this is effortless. It requires Congress to bind its future self, which is exactly the thing Congress is worst at. But Switzerland didn’t solve this with a smarter finance ministry. It solved it with a rule simple enough to survive politicians who’d rather it didn’t exist, adopted in time to bank two decades of good years before anyone needed to test it. The United States does not have two decades to spare before its own test arrives. It has, on the government’s own numbers, about four years, and a bill already written to start the clock running the other direction. The only question left is whether anyone picks it up before 2030 makes the point for them.

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