In response to interest expressed by Members of Congress, the Congressional Budget Office has done some analyses of how economic outcomes and the allocation of federal resources vary among different groups of people on the basis of their age, education, income or wealth, race or ethnicity, and sex. For example, in our most recent Budget and Economic Outlook, we examined how the labor market’s recovery from the 2020 recession differed for women and men and for people in different racial and ethnic groups. We have created a new page on our website making those distributional analyses accessible in one place.
Understanding how different outcomes for different groups of people may be linked to policies and their implementation is a high priority for CBO, and we are enhancing our capabilities to do such analyses. For example, in a recent letter to the Chairman of the House Budget Committee, we described our efforts to increase the agency’s capacity to analyze how the effects of federal policies may differ by race and ethnicity. We also reviewed some challenges regarding the availability of data that can be used for that purpose. We are working hard to complete more analyses and look forward to sharing the results.
Phillip L. Swagel is CBO’s Director