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Komor Campaign Responds to $40 Trillion Federal Debt Milestone

August 20, 2026 | Contact: Christian Komor | Christian Komor for Colorado Governor 2026 | christiankomor@k4gov.comk4gov.com


Independent Write-In Candidate Names the Bipartisan Blind Spot Both Parties Refuse to Discuss

FRUITA, CO — Dr. Christian Komor, Independent write-in candidate for Colorado Governor, today responded to the U.S. Treasury Department's confirmation that the national debt has surpassed $40 trillion for the first time in American history — a milestone reached only five months after the debt crossed $39 trillion in March 2026, and less than five years after crossing $30 trillion.


"America has a bipartisan blind spot," Dr. Komor said. "The right thinks corporations are patriotic actors when they aren't. The left thinks the military is a mission when it's largely a jobs program. Both sides give reverence to institutions that should be treated as public policy tools. The uniform deserves respect. The corporate structure does not. The mission deserves funding. The contractor extraction system does not. If we treated defense with fiscal skepticism and corporations with regulatory realism, we could redirect $300 to $500 billion a year toward productive investment without hurting a single soldier or eliminating a single legitimate business."


What the numbers actually show

The Treasury Department confirmed the $40.047 trillion total on Wednesday, August 19. The debt has doubled in less than a decade — it stood at $19.4 trillion in 2016 and $19.95 trillion in January 2017.


Federal spending for FY 2026 is projected at approximately $7.4 trillion against $5.6 trillion in revenue — a $1.85 trillion annual shortfall equal to 5.8 percent of GDP. The Congressional Budget Office confirms that five categories account for roughly 75 to 80 percent of all federal spending:


  • Social Security: $1.50 trillion (22% of the budget)

  • Medicare: $1.00 trillion (14% of the budget)

  • Net Interest on Debt: $900 billion (13% and rising fastest)

  • Defense: $886 billion plus $42 billion Iran supplemental (13-14%)

  • Medicaid and health programs: $850 billion (14%)


Interest on the debt alone — $900 billion this year — now nearly matches the entire defense budget and is the fastest-growing category of federal spending, up 9.8 percent year-over-year. The Treasury is borrowing roughly $155 billion every month and paying $24 billion every week just to service existing debt.

"The math is not complicated," Dr. Komor said. "You cannot close a $1.85 trillion deficit by cutting the National Institutes of Health, the Environmental Protection Agency, and foreign aid. Every single discretionary program the government funds could be zeroed out and the deficit would still exceed a trillion dollars. The parts being cut are not the parts driving the debt."


The One Big Beautiful Bill Act is the single largest driver of the last trillion in debt

The national debt has grown by more than $1 trillion in the five months since March 2026, when it crossed $39 trillion. The Congressional Budget Office's updated post-passage analysis attributes $4.7 trillion of the projected 2026-2035 deficit to a single piece of legislation: the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), signed into law in 2025. That figure includes $3.7 trillion in primary deficit increase, $900 billion in additional debt-service costs, and approximately $100 billion in costs from projected economic damage.

OBBBA is responsible for more than 20 percent of all projected federal deficits over the next decade. It was sold as fiscal restraint. It did the opposite. It is the largest single legislative contributor to the milestone the country crossed on Tuesday.


"Any candidate for governor of Colorado who supported OBBBA and now expresses concern about the $40 trillion debt is failing the honesty test," Dr. Komor said. "The bill was projected to add $4.7 trillion to the deficit before it passed. It is doing exactly what CBO said it would do. Voters deserve to know which candidates supported the specific legislation that is driving the crisis they claim to want to solve. The bill increased the federal deficit by roughly 0.8 percent of GDP in fiscal year 2026 alone. That is not a rounding error. That is the largest legislative deficit increase since the pandemic."


Where the actual money goes

Dr. Komor pointed to two long-protected categories where fiscal reform has been politically off-limits under both parties.


Defense as a jobs program. With approximately 5 to 6 million American workers dependent on defense outlays — 1.3 million active duty, 750,000 civilian Department of Defense employees, and an estimated 3 to 4 million contractor jobs — the defense budget functions as the largest federal employment program in America. The Eisenhower warning about the military-industrial complex, delivered in his 1961 farewell address, described the exact dynamic the country now faces.


"The people wearing the uniform deserve a defense budget that's about their mission, not a budget that treats them as employment statistics," Dr. Komor said. "The corporate contractors — Lockheed, Raytheon, Northrop, General Dynamics — are the actual dole recipients. Reforming that extraction system is respectful to the warrior class, not dismissive of it. Bipartisan defense reformers have long identified 15 to 20 percent of the defense budget as achievable savings — that is $140 to $180 billion per year available without touching a single service member's pay, benefits, or mission."


Corporate profit repatriation and offshore taxation. U.S. multinational corporations hold an estimated $2.5 to $3 trillion in accumulated offshore profits. The 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act imposed a one-time repatriation tax that brought some money back — most of which was used for stock buybacks rather than domestic investment. The Global Intangible Low-Taxed Income (GILTI) regime taxes foreign profits at 10.5 percent, half the domestic corporate rate, preserving the incentive to shift profits offshore.


"Corporations are legally structured to maximize shareholder return," Dr. Komor said. "They are not patriotic actors and cannot be counted on to serve the national interest without a regulatory framework that requires it. Expecting corporate loyalty without that framework has produced a hollowed-out manufacturing base, semiconductor capacity offshored to Taiwan and Korea, pharmaceutical supply chains dependent on China, and rare earth processing 90 percent controlled by China. Closing the offshore profit loophole and enforcing a real 21 percent effective rate on U.S. corporate income — including foreign subsidiaries — is estimated to generate $150 to $300 billion per year in new federal revenue."


What a Colorado governor can actually do

Federal fiscal reform is a federal question. But Dr. Komor identified four levers available to a Colorado governor without requiring federal cooperation:

  1. State-level corporate tax reform. Colorado can adopt worldwide combined reporting that treats multinational corporations as single entities for state tax purposes — a policy upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court and previously used by other states.

  2. Public contracting preferences. Colorado's approximately $40 billion state budget procurement can favor companies with U.S.-based operations, U.S. supply chains, and U.S. tax residence, consistent with Buy American doctrine.

  3. Pension fund voting policy. The Colorado Public Employees' Retirement Association (PERA), a large institutional shareholder, can vote its shares in favor of corporate tax transparency, domestic operations reporting, and executive-pay accountability, and against unproductive stock buyback authorizations.

  4. SkyCarbon Development Authority. The Komor campaign's proposed state-owned enterprise structure for climate infrastructure is designed specifically to keep value streams inside Colorado rather than allowing private capital to extract profit to offshore tax jurisdictions.


The federal fiscal frame Colorado voters should hear

"The situation is stuck," Dr. Komor said, "because the coalitions defending Social Security, Medicare, and Defense do not overlap. There is no majority for cutting all three, and cutting only one is politically fatal to whoever attempts it. Every candidate who claims they will 'balance the budget' by cutting waste is lying — the waste isn't in the budget, the waste is in how we categorize spending that has become untouchable. Naming that honestly is the beginning of any serious fiscal conversation, and neither major party has been willing to name it."


"The federal debt crossing $40 trillion is a warning that Colorado needs a governor who understands what is actually happening in Washington and where the state has actual leverage. Reverence for institutions is a substitute for policy. Colorado deserves policy."


About Christian Komor

Dr. Christian R. Komor is an Independent write-in candidate for Colorado Governor in the 2026 general election. A clinical psychologist (Psy.D.), former White House Earth Systems Science Advisor, and author, Dr. Komor is the architect of the SkyCarbon Blueprint — a Colorado-first climate-and-industry platform pairing hyperscale data centers, direct atmospheric carbon removal, geothermal power, and Eastern Plains water benefits. His campaign takes no dark money.


Learn more: k4gov.com

Write in: Christian Komor for Colorado Governor


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