US Collected A Record $22BN In Tariffs In May… Which Was Just 3% Of Total Government Spending

First the good news. One month after April recorded the second biggest budget surplus on record (at $258BN), a total which was boosted by generous customs duties collected as a result of Trump’s aggressive tariff and trade war escalation, in May the amount of tariff receipts was off the charts, soaring to a record $22.2 billion…

… or more than triple the amount of customs duties collected during any month of the Trump 1.0 trade war. 

As for the bad news… well, you probably know where we’re going with this. Unfortunately, that record $22.2 Billion in tariffs is a drop in the pool compared to all the US government spending, which there was a lot of in May, $687.2 Billion to be precise (up 2.5% from a year ago) so the tariffs covered precisely… 3% of US government spending. 

To smooth out the chart, here is the same spending data on a 6 month moving average basis. With the exception of the covid panic, the US government has never spent more!

Of course, it wasn’t just tariffs, and in May total government tax receipts rose 15% to $371.2 Billion (which includes the surge in tariffs) from $323.6 Billion last year. Not bad, until one realizes that total monthly tax revenue is basically flat for the past 4 years, while spending has continued to grow exponentially higher. 

Naturally, the difference between government tax receipts and spending is known as the deficit, and in May  it was $316BN, a modest improvement to the $347BN deficit one year ago, if just above the $314BN estimate.

Putting it all together, the cumulative deficit for fiscal 2015 is now $1.365 trillion. This is a substantial improvement to the trendline that was in place before Trump came into the white house (as of January, the cumulative 2025 fiscal deficit was the highest ever), but it is higher compared to the $1.202 trillion cumulative deficit in 2024, and it is certainly higher on a cumulative basis as of May – with just 4 more months left in the fiscal year – than any other year on record except the outliers of 2020 and 2021.

And while all of that is a good start, and certainly a big improvement in the US fiscal picture in the first three months of Trump’s regime, the big picture sadly remains a dismal one, largely because the US debt picture remains completely unsustainable, manifesting itself in $92.2 billion in interest payments in May…

… and a cumulative $1.2 trillion in gross interest expense per year, just $300 billion shy of the biggest spending category of them all: Social Security Spending. 

That said, April’s bumper revenue aside, all five main spending categories are growing much faster than revenue, and something drastically has to change for this big picture to become viable. Unfortunately, we have now seen the wholsesale pushback Trump has faced when doing just that – trying to restructure a broken status quo – which is why unless Trump magically succeeds in this undertaking, the US is pretty much doomed (while DOGE’s achievements have been admirable, they are a drop in the bucket in the context of overall spending) as nobody else will ever come close to Trump’s intended overhaul of the US fiscal picture.