CBO Blog

In 2017, the government financed roughly $100 billion in student loans and provided about $30 billion in grants and $30 billion in tax preferences. This report examines the impact of such aid and a number of approaches to changing it.

Today CBO released The 2018 Long-Term Budget Outlook. The report finds that if current laws generally remained unchanged, growing budget deficits would boost debt sharply in coming years.

In 2016, students pursuing higher education received about $91 billion in financial support from federal spending programs and tax expenditures. This report examines the distribution of that assistance among households, by income group.

This blog post explains how CBO assesses the macroeconomic effects of changes in federal spending for research and development. It also highlights areas in which additional research would enhance CBO’s capacity to evaluate such spending.

CBO will release The 2018 Long-Term Budget Outlook at 10:00 a.m. on Tuesday, June 26. The long-term projections—which span 30 years—are consistent with CBO’s latest 10-year budget and economic projections.

The report focuses on the accuracy of projections for fiscal year 2017—made about a year and half before the end of that fiscal year—and also makes comparisons with the accuracy of CBO’s corresponding projections for the 1993–2016 period.

CBO’s March 2016 projections of federal outlays for fiscal year 2017 were $65 billion—or 1.6 percent—more than the actual amount reported by OMB. By comparison, the mean absolute error for projections made for 1993 to 2016 is 2.3 percent.

The federal budget deficit was $530 billion for the first eight months of fiscal year 2018, CBO estimates, $97 billion more than the shortfall recorded during the same period last year.

CBO learns from many outside experts, including our Panel of Economic Advisers, about important analytical issues in the advisers’ areas of expertise and to obtain feedback about our economic forecast.

Over the next 10 years, the cumulative deficit under the President’s proposals would be $3.0 trillion less than the $12.4 trillion in CBO’s baseline. The deficit would average 3.7 percent of GDP, CBO estimates.