Expired and Expiring Authorizations of Appropriations: Fiscal Year 2019

Authorizations of appropriations are provisions of law that authorize funds to be provided through a future appropriation law to carry out a program or function; they differ from other authorizations (sometimes called enabling or organic statutes), which create a federal agency, establish a federal program, prescribe a federal function, or provide for a particular federal obligation or expenditure within a program. Authorizations of appropriations also differ from appropriations, which generally provide funding once those authorizations are in place.

Each year, CBO reports to the Congress on programs and activities funded for the current fiscal year whose authorizations of appropriations have expired and on programs and activities whose authorizations will expire during the current fiscal year.

For this report, CBO identified 971 authorizations of appropriations that expired before the beginning of fiscal year 2019 that had not been overtaken by subsequent legislation. By CBO’s estimate, at least $307 billion has been appropriated for fiscal year 2019 for the agencies, programs, or functions covered by those authorizations.

This report summarizes the information, sorted by jurisdiction (for the applicable House and Senate authorizing committees and for the appropriations subcommittees). The report is accompanied by supplemental data underlying those summaries in sortable and searchable spreadsheets that list every authorization of appropriations that CBO is currently tracking in its Legislative Classification System.

For more information on CBO’s estimates of appropriation legislation, visit the agency’s Status of Appropriations page.