Updated Information About Federal Debt and the Statutory Limit
Report
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.
On the basis of additional data and updated projections of expected borrowing in the short term, the Congressional Budget Office confirms that the extraordinary measures will be exhausted in the first few days of November and that the Treasury’s cash balance is likely to fall below $30 billion—an amount that the Treasury states will be far short of net expenditures on certain dates—at about the same time. The Treasury’s cash balance will continue to fall thereafter and could be well below $30 billion by the end of the first week of November.
CBO’s staff has recently discussed with debt management analysts at the Treasury Department the data they used to project major cash flows over the next two weeks. Those projections are very similar to CBO’s own expectations of large payments and deposits in that period. CBO has also incorporated in its estimates the most recent information on actual cash flows.
As of today, estimates of Treasury’s cash balances over the next few weeks are slightly lower than they were on October 14, when CBO projected that “if the debt limit remains unchanged, the Treasury will begin running a very low cash balance in early November, and the extraordinary measures will be exhausted and the cash balance entirely depleted sometime during the first half of November.”
