According to the September Monthly Treasury report, the US government accumulated an additional 1.7 trillion dollars in debt for the 2023 fiscal year, which ended October 31.  That' up by $319 billion, or 23 percent, from the 2022 fiscal year. As recently as June, budget-watchers had estimated the year-end deficit would be $1.5 trillion, but deficits quickly added on an unexpected $200 billion by years' end:

The pace of increase, however, may have been even higher than 23 percent. As CNN noted, the $1.7 trillion number may reflect some creative accounting. As CNN reports, the Treasury Department reported the cancellation of Biden's student loan forgiveness program as a windfall for federal revenues, and thus reduced 2023's deficit by about $300 billion, bringing it down to $1.7 trillion. In other words, if we ignore the never-implemented student loan forgiveness program, the deficit actually doubled from FY 2022 to 2023. As CNN puts it: "The US Treasury Department listed the fiscal year 2022 deficit as $1.4 trillion because it took into account the cost of the president's proposal. Without it, the deficit would have been closer to $1 trillion. … The agency then logged the overturning of the cancellation plan as a savings for fiscal year 2023, which reduced the size of the deficit to $1.7 trillion."

So, the year-over-year increase in the deficit may have actually gone from about $1 trillion to $2 trillion—or an increase of 100 percent instead of 23 percent.

In any case, annual deficits are rapidly growing toward the unprecedented deficits of 2020 and 2021 when the federal government went deeply into debt to avoid an immediate economic catastrophe as a result of government-mandated lockdowns and business closures. In the wake of these enormous deficits, the national debt—the sum of accumulated annual deficits—has now topped $33 trillion. That's an increase of more than $6 trillion just since the beginning of the Covid Panic, and an increase of $18 trillion since the beginning of the 2008 financial crisis.