During their first debate of the general election, President Joe Biden accused former President Donald Trump of raising the deficit more than any other president, blasting his predecessor for accruing the “largest deficit of any president within a four-year period.” While CNN moderator Jake Tapper cited a decadelong estimate of total projected spending by the Committee For a Responsible Federal Budget, the incumbent president is wrong. The president to approve the greatest deficit increase during his tenure is not Trump, but rather, Biden.

According to monthly data from Treasury Department, Trump spent $5.9 trillion more than he brought in from January 2017 to December 2020.

To compare that to Biden, we use two sources of data: adding together the existing Treasury data from January 2021 through September 2023, $5.3 trillion in compound deficit, and then the deficit projection by the Congressional Budget Office for fiscal 2024, which runs from October 2023 through September of this year, $1.9 trillion. The total then comes to about $7.2 trillion. It’s not a perfect four-year comparison, but it comes close. This is also a more meaningful measure than merely comparing the overall levels of debt held by the public because of the Treasury’s idiosyncratic excess cash reserves during the pandemic.

Another way to measure this is to compare the CBO’s annual budgets, which adhere to the fiscal year calendars. This means this estimate will include the September through December of the previous presidency, but we get a better comparison of exactly four years of Trump and four years of Biden.

Trump racked up $5.6 trillion of debt from fiscal 2017 through fiscal 2020, according to the CBO. From fiscal 2021 through the projected fiscal 2024, Biden will have accumulated $7.8 trillion in debt.

Trump could hardly be accused of fiscal restraint, but no president in history has proved as wasteful as Biden.