fed-debt 🇺🇸

Check the current US federal debt, to the penny.

$ fed-debt
$39,828,435,390,891.55

$ fed-debt --verbose
               US Federal Debt — 2026-08-04
┌──────────────────────────────┬──────────────────────┐
│ Metric                       │              Amount   │
├──────────────────────────────┼──────────────────────┤
│ Total Public Debt Outstanding │ $39,828,435,390,891.55 │
│ Debt Held by the Public       │ $32,100,703,256,953.12 │
│ Intragovernmental Holdings    │  $7,727,732,133,938.43 │
│ Debt per US Citizen           │            $118,890.85 │
└──────────────────────────────┴──────────────────────┘

Install

From PyPI (recommended)

pip install fed-debt

Or with ticker support (requires windows-curses on Windows):

pip install "fed-debt[ticker]"

From source

git clone https://gitlab.com/x0rn/fed-debt.git
cd fed-debt
py -m pip install -e .

Or for the ticker:

py -m pip install -e ".[ticker]"

Usage

Ticker

The --ticker flag opens a thin, 3-line curses window that shows a continuously incrementing debt counter. Instead of polling the API every few seconds (wasteful — the data only updates once a day at 3:00 PM ET), it:

1. Fetches the latest official reading on startup
2. Estimates the per-second growth from recent history (~$1.3B/day)
3. Interpolates the current value in real-time

Press q to quit, r to force a re-sync with the Treasury API.

Data Source

U.S. Treasury Fiscal Data — Debt to the Penny endpoint, updated daily at 3:00 PM ET.

Future

• --chart — terminal-based historical charts (via plotext)
• --since — see the debt on a specific past date
• GUI/web backend using the same api.py module