February 2019

CBO Director Keith Hall discusses changes to CBO’s economic forecast since January 2017 and provides an estimate of the portion of those changes that can be attributed to the enactment of the 2017 tax act.

Theresa Gullo, CBO’s Assistant Director for Budget Analysis, testifies before the Committee on the Budget, United States Senate, about discretionary funding following enactment of the Budget Control Act of 2011.

CBO projects that if the debt limit is not raised or suspended again after it is automatically reset on March 2, the Treasury will probably run out of cash near the end of fiscal year 2019 or early in fiscal year 2020.

As required, CBO reports on whether appropriations enacted for the current fiscal year have exceeded the statutory caps on discretionary funding. In CBO’s estimation, they have not, and a sequestration will not be required for 2019.

As the 116th Congress gets under way, CBO Director Keith Hall would like to highlight a number of multimedia, interactive, and analytical resources on CBO’s website that Members of Congress and Congressional staff might find useful.

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.