Available data show that net interest on the U.S. federal debt has risen sharply since 2021 but is still far below the ~30% share of the federal budget that Sacks predicted, and the key triggering condition (“when interest rates revert to the historical norm”) is itself ambiguous and arguably not yet fully met.

Key points:

• Current interest share of the federal budget:

  • In FY 2023, net interest outlays were about 11% of total federal spending, according to CBO-based summaries. (americanactionforum.org)
  • In FY 2024, net interest reached roughly $880–$880+ billion, about 13% of all federal expenditures, making interest the third‑largest spending item after Social Security and health care. (pewresearch.org)
  • CBO’s January 2025 outlook projects net interest will be about 14% of federal outlays in FY 2025 and rise to “nearly 17 percent” of federal spending by 2035—still well below 30%. (americanactionforum.org)

• Have interest rates “returned to their historical norm”?

  • The 10‑year Treasury yield averaged 3.96% in 2023 and 4.41% in 2024; a long‑run historical mean for the 10‑year is about 4.46% over more than a century, and about 5.9% if you start in 1962. (upmyinterest.com)
  • The average interest rate on federal debt held by the public was only 2.5% in 2023 and projected around 3.1% in 2024, with CBO assuming an average 3.5% over 2025–2054—higher than the ultra‑low 2010s, but still below many definitions of the long‑term “historical norm” that include the high‑rate 1970s–1980s. (pgpf.org)
  • Because much of the debt was issued at very low rates and rolls over slowly, the effective rate the government actually pays has not yet fully converged to long‑run averages, even though current market yields are closer to them.

• Forward‑looking projections:

  • CBO and independent summaries generally project net interest to reach around 17% of federal outlays by the mid‑2030s, and interest costs around 5–6% of GDP by the 2040s–2050s; some analyses suggest interest could reach roughly one‑third of federal revenues by mid‑century, but not 30% of total spending. (americanactionforum.org)

Why this is “inconclusive” rather than clearly “wrong”:

• Sacks framed the claim conditionally: when interest rates revert to their historical norm, interest will be ~30% of the budget. There is no explicit date, and “historical norm” (which rate, over which time window) is not precisely defined.
• As of late 2025, net interest is only in the low‑teens percent of total outlays, not 30%. However, the average rate on the outstanding debt has not yet fully reached many commonly cited “normal” levels, and substantial additional rollover at higher rates could further increase interest’s budget share.
• Official long‑term projections do not currently foresee interest ever reaching 30% of total outlays under baseline assumptions, which suggests Sacks’s 30% figure is much higher than mainstream forecasts. But since his statement concerns a future condition that may not yet have occurred—and projections decades out are uncertain—it cannot be definitively falsified at this time.

Given (1) interest costs are rising but still far below 30% of federal spending, and (2) the triggering condition and timeline remain ambiguous, the fairest assessment as of November 2025 is that the prediction’s truth value is not yet knowable, hence “inconclusive.”