In fiscal year 2015, which ended on September 30, the federal budget deficit totaled $439 billion—$44 billion less than the shortfall in 2014. Fiscal year 2015 was the sixth consecutive year in which the deficit declined as a share of the nation's gross domestic product.
CBO Blog
CBO Director Keith Hall spoke to the Board of Trustees for the Manufacturers Alliance for Productivity and Innovation about CBO’s latest long-term projections.
CBO has assessed how much the supply of various types of renewable fuels would have to increase over the next several years to comply with the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS), and how food and fuel prices would vary in three scenarios.
CBO estimates that the cost of the Navy’s 2016 shipbuilding plan—an average of about $20 billion per year (adjusted for inflation) over 30 years—would be $4 billion higher than the funding that the Navy has received in recent decades.
In CBO’s updated analysis, extraordinary measures for borrowing additional funds without breaching the debt ceiling will be exhausted and the Treasury’s cash balance is likely to fall below $30 billion in the first few days of November.
CBO concludes that existing evidence does not indicate that certain policies to treat obesity would significantly reduce federal spending. Additional well-designed studies on the effects of such policies would be useful for CBO's analysis.
If the debt limit remains unchanged, CBO projects, the Treasury’s cash balance will be entirely depleted sometime in the first half of November, at which time the government would be unable to fully pay its obligations.
The federal government ran a budget deficit of $435 billion fiscal year 2015, CBO estimates, the smallest deficit recorded since 2007; the Treasury Department will report the actual deficit for fiscal year 2015 later this month.
Since 1990, real spending for child nutrition programs more than doubled—to $20 billion in 2014. CBO expects that increases in food prices and demographic changes will cause spending to rise further in the future.
How do CBO's projections of federal receipts and expenditures in the national income and product accounts compare with CBO's baseline projections of revenues and outlays in the federal budget?