the federal reserve which you can imagine like a big bank hands out a loan to the government.

No. Debt goes directly to markets. Federal Reserve QE operations are acts of imagining new money to buy bonds from the market. You are describing QE operations, not debt. Past QE operations have forgone interest on Federal reserve holdings, gifting it to Treasury such that the bonds that Fed holds become interest free. The accounting magic is that when the bond is finally due, the Federal reserve does get paid in order to erase the imaginary money they created to buy the bonds. But a given QE balance sheet level, they just buy a new bond from the market with new imagined money.