Expired and Expiring Authorizations of Appropriations: 2025 Preliminary Report

CBO reports annually on programs whose authorizations of appropriations have already expired or will expire. This data file covers legislation enacted through September 30, 2024. A full report will be issued later this year.
Summary
Authorizations are laws that establish or continue the operation of federal agencies or programs. One type of authorization—broad enabling legislation—creates an agency, program, or activity and sets guidelines for how it will operate. A second type of authorization—an authorization of appropriations—explicitly authorizes funding for an agency, program, or activity and provides guidance to the Appropriations Committees on the amount lawmakers envision.
Authorizations of appropriations sometimes appear later in the same statute that broadly authorized the agency, program, or activity. They may also appear in subsequent laws amending the enabling statutes or in separately enacted legislation.
Authorizations of appropriations provide guidance on funding for many—but not all—authorized agencies, programs, and activities. That guidance may be permanent or may cover only a specific period and include an expiration date.
The Congressional Budget Act of 1974 requires the Congressional Budget Office to report to the Congress by January 15 of each year on the following:
- All programs and activities whose authorizations of appropriations will expire during the current fiscal year, and
- All programs and activities funded for the current fiscal year whose authorizations of appropriations have expired.
In this report, released as a data file with a sortable spreadsheet, CBO lists all nonpermanent authorizations of appropriations—both those that have already expired and those that are scheduled to expire this fiscal year or in the following years (the smallest circle in the figure below). The spreadsheet specifies the expiration date (which is usually the last day of a fiscal year) and the amount authorized to be appropriated in the last fiscal year covered by that authorization. The data are drawn from CBO’s Legislative Classification System and cover legislation enacted through September 30, 2024, the end of fiscal year 2024. Additional worksheets in the file provide instructions for sorting the data and a glossary.

This report does not identify full-year appropriations for the current fiscal year that can be associated with authorizations of appropriations that have previously expired. That is because it was prepared when agencies that typically receive annual appropriations were operating under a short-term continuing resolution. After final appropriations for 2025 have been enacted, CBO will release a longer report identifying appropriations for the fiscal year that are associated with expired authorizations of appropriations.
CBO’s past reports associating appropriations with expired authorizations of appropriations show that, in most years, lawmakers enact appropriations for some agencies, programs, and activities whose authorizations of appropriations have lapsed. If an authorization of appropriations has expired, it does not necessarily mean that the underlying authority to operate the agency, program, or activity has also expired. Programs providing medical care for veterans, for example, have sustained underlying authority. The authorization of appropriations for those programs (in Public Law 104-262) expired in 1998, but the programs currently remain authorized. The broad authorizations, which were originally enacted in 1958 (in Public Law 85-857), have been amended many times since then and are codified at 38 U.S.C. §1701 et seq.
For more examples, see the testimony of former CBO Director Keith Hall before the Senate Budget Committee in 2016. He noted that the agency’s reports of expired and expiring authorizations of appropriations cannot be used to assess whether funding has been provided for agencies, programs, or activities that are unauthorized.