CBO Blog

CBO estimates that if the Department of Defense implemented the plans described in its 2019 Future Years Defense Program, its base-budget costs (in 2019 dollars) would climb from the $617 billion requested for 2019 to $735 billion in 2033.

CBO will not publish the Monthly Budget Review for January 2019 because some data that the agency would have used to produce the report were unavailable as a result of the federal government’s partial shutdown from December 22, 2018, to January 25, 2019.

This report describes the methods used to assess how the new rules would affect the number of people who obtain health insurance and the costs of federal subsidies for that coverage. It also provides details about those projected effects.

This morning I briefed the press about The Budget and Economic Outlook: 2019 to 2029, which CBO published today. I delivered the following remarks about that report. Also presented here are some answers to questions that I expected to receive.

In CBO’s projections, deficits remain large by historical standards, and federal debt grows to equal 93 percent of GDP by 2029. As the effects of fiscal stimulus wane, projected economic growth falls back below the historical average.

CBO estimates that the partial shutdown delayed $18 billion in federal spending and suspended some federal services, thus lowering the projected level of real GDP in the first quarter of 2019 by $8 billion (in 2019 dollars), or 0.2 percent.

In this report, CBO projects, on the basis of current law, marginal federal tax rates on labor income from 2018 through 2028. So that current trends can be understood in a historical context, the projections are accompanied by rates from 1962.

The Administration’s current plans for U.S. nuclear forces would cost $494 billion over the 2019–2028 period—$94 billion more than CBO’s 2017 estimate for the 2017–2026 period, in part because modernization programs continue to ramp up.

For this report to be complete and as useful to the Congress as possible, the House and Senate Budget Committees have asked CBO to delay publishing it until it can fully account for the funding provided in all 12 annual appropriation bills.

CBO will release its annual Budget and Economic Outlook at 10:00 a.m. ET on January 28. The report will include updated economic and budget projections spanning the period from 2019 to 2029.