IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva (L) speaks with US Secretary of Treasury Scott Bessent ahead of a morning work meeting to "revive balanced, inclusive, and sustainable economic growth for the benefit of all" in the presence of the G7 countries, partner countries, the International Monetary Fund, and the OECD, as part of the G7 summit, in Evian, eastern France, on June 17, 2026.

BANGKOK — The head of the International Monetary Fund has urged Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to trim the deficit, warning that his plan to lean on growth to tame U.S. Government debt isn't sufficient.

"Growth of course helps, but it cannot deliver fast enough the necessary adjustments," Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva said at a panel Wednesday at the IMF-World Bank annual meetings in Bangkok. "Some [fiscal] measures would be necessary."

Georgieva said Bessent recognizes that federal deficits and overall debt have grown "too high," and that measures to improve the budget balance and reduce the debt are necessary. But "the authorities very much rely on strong growth in the United States" to bring them down, she said.

Bessent and Trump administration officials have touted resilient economic growth, driven by the artificial-intelligence build-out, reshoring manufacturing and tax cuts for consumers, as crucial tools to improve the U.S. fiscal posture.

"With 3% growth, we grow our way out of this," Bessent said last month. He has argued sustained growth above 3%, combined with spending restraint, could lower the debt ratio and bend the debt-to-GDP curve.

U.S. federal debt has exceeded 100% of gross domestic product, once an unthinkable threshold, with the country's public debt load surpassing $40 trillion and on track to break a record set in the aftermath of World War II.

The U.S. government has historically spent more than it collects through taxation, committing to unbalanced spending in the decades since President Bill Clinton briefly managed to balance the budget in the 1990s. But debt-financed spending has sharply accelerated in recent years. Trump cut taxes in his first term and signed the first Covid relief packages in 2020, which Joe Biden followed with a $1.9 trillion stimulus in 2021.