Expired and Expiring Authorizations of Appropriations: 2025 Final Report

Summary

This report fulfills the Congressional Budget Office’s statutory requirement to report to the Congress on all programs and activities funded for the current fiscal year whose authorizations of appropriations have expired as well as all programs and activities whose authorizations of appropriations will expire during the current fiscal year. (Those authorizations of appropriations with specified expiration dates are only a small subset of all authorizations in law.) This final report updates CBO’s preliminary report, released on January 15, 2025, which did not include information about appropriations provided for fiscal year 2025 for programs and activities with expired authorizations of appropriations because full-year appropriations were not yet enacted.1

For this final report, CBO identified 1,326 authorizations of appropriations that expired before the beginning of fiscal year 2025 and identified fiscal year 2025 appropriations—totaling $500 billion—associated with 457 of those expired authorizations. CBO also identified 304 authorizations that are set to expire before the end of fiscal year 2025. It is possible that appropriations other than those identified by CBO may be available to carry out programs and activities with expired authorizations.

Background and Scope of This Report

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—provides explicit guidance to the Appropriations Committees on the amount of funding that lawmakers envision for a particular agency, program, or activity.2

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. Authorizations of appropriations sometimes appear later in the same statute that broadly authorizes the agency, program, or activity. They may also appear in subsequent laws amending the enabling statutes or in separately enacted legislation.

See Figure 1 for an illustration of the authorizations of appropriations that fall within the scope of this report, as depicted by the second-smallest circle in the figure. This report fulfills the requirement of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974 for CBO to report to the Congress each year on the following:

• All programs and activities funded for the current fiscal year whose authorizations of appropriations have expired, and
• All programs and activities whose authorizations of appropriations will expire during the current fiscal year.

  Figure 1.

  Scope of CBO’s Final Report on Authorizations of Appropriations for Fiscal Year 2025

  

  CBO tracks just the authorizations that fall within the scope of this report. The sizes of the circles and their partitions do not indicate the relative size of each group.

  Notes

  Data source: Congressional Budget Office.

CBO’s annual reports are intended to aid the Congress by providing relevant information about expired or expiring authorizations, but they are not and should not be considered definitive with respect to the application of House or Senate rules about appropriating funds. House and Senate rules may restrict lawmakers from considering an appropriation if it lacks a current authorization.3 The determination of whether that is the case is made by the Speaker of the House or the Presiding Officer of the Senate on the basis of advice from the relevant chamber’s Office of the Parliamentarian. Historically, the rules that would potentially strike proposed appropriations without authorizations from legislation have often been suspended or waived, thereby enabling those appropriations to be considered and adopted by the Congress.

Data Used in This Report

Because full-year appropriations were not enacted by January 15, 2025, CBO could not report on funding provided for programs and activities with expired authorizations of appropriations in its preliminary report; CBO only provided data on expired and expiring authorizations of appropriations. This final report, which incorporates legislation enacted through March 15, 2025 (including Public Law 119-4, the Full-Year Continuing Appropriations and Extensions Act, 2025), includes updated data on expired and expiring authorizations, as well as appropriations for 2025 that CBO has associated with expired authorizations of appropriations.

The information summarized in this report is drawn from CBO’s Legislative Classification System (LCS) database.4 Funding identified for programs and activities with expired authorizations includes only those appropriations that could clearly be associated with expired authorizations on the basis of legislative text or, when applicable, explanatory statements that accompanied appropriation legislation enacted for fiscal year 2024.5 It is therefore possible that other appropriations may be available to carry out programs and activities with expired authorizations.

Accompanying this report is a sortable spreadsheet in which CBO has listed all nonpermanent authorizations of appropriations in its LCS database—both those that have already expired and those that are scheduled to expire this fiscal year or in subsequent years—as depicted by the second-smallest circle in Figure 1. The spreadsheet specifies the expiration date (which is usually the last day of a fiscal year); the amount authorized to be appropriated in the last fiscal year covered by the authorization; and any 2025 appropriations associated with expired authorizations, which are represented by the smallest circle in Figure 1. (Authorizations that expired before 2025 but are not associated with any 2025 appropriations fall outside that smallest circle.) Additional worksheets in the file provide instructions for sorting the data and a glossary.

Authorizations and Appropriations Identified for This Report

CBO identified 1,326 authorizations of appropriations that expired before the beginning of fiscal year 2025 (about half of which expired at least a decade ago; the oldest expired in 1980) and 304 that were set to expire by the end of fiscal year 2025.6 Nearly two-thirds of the expired authorizations, which CBO identified for each House and Senate authorizing committee (see Table 1) and appropriations subcommittee (see Table 2), were for specified amounts of annual funding that, when combined, totaled $103 billion for the years when they were last in effect. The remainder authorized appropriations of indefinite amounts.7

CBO estimates that $500 billion in funding for fiscal year 2025 can be attributed to 457 of the 1,326 expired authorizations. Of that total, $374 billion is associated with specified authorizations and $126 billion with indefinite authorizations. Nearly two-thirds ($307 billion) of that $500 billion was provided for activities whose authorizations expired more than a decade ago. CBO could not identify appropriations for fiscal year 2025 for 869 expired authorizations—that is, clear connections could not be made between the language of those authorizations and the amounts appropriated for 2025.8

Overall, according to CBO’s records, funding provided under expired authorizations dropped from $516 billion in 2024 to $500 billion in 2025—a decrease of about 3 percent. Funding for expired authorizations is mostly attributable to a small group of expired authorizations: 23 laws were identified as major sources of expired authorizations for which appropriations were provided in both 2024 and 2025 (see Table 3).9 In 2025, those laws accounted for $450 billion of the $500 billion in total funding for expired authorizations that CBO identified.

CBO estimates that specified authorizations of appropriations set to expire during 2025 total $908 billion (see Table 4). Most of that amount is authorized for defense activities, which, historically, have been reauthorized annually.

How CBO Identifies Expired and Expiring Authorizations of Appropriations

The remainder of this report explains CBO’s method for analyzing legislation and preparing the data contained in the LCS.

Phase 1: Review Authorizations

CBO’s analysts review the text of newly enacted laws to identify provisions that create new authorizations of appropriations or that amend, extend, or repeal existing ones. To be included in this report, each authorization must meet three criteria:

• It explicitly authorizes an appropriation. Only authorizations that explicitly authorize funding for an agency, program, or activity and provide guidance to the Appropriations Committees on the amount lawmakers envision are considered for this report.
• Subsequent funding would be provided by an appropriation act. This report focuses on authorizations for funding that CBO expects would be provided in legislation under the jurisdiction of the House or Senate Committee on Appropriations.
• The authorization has a specified expiration date. Authorizations of appropriations do not fall within the scope of this report if they are permanent.10 Because the report excludes explicit authorizations that do not expire, it cannot be considered an exhaustive list of enacted authorizations of appropriations.

Phase 2: Catalog Authorizations

During the second phase of the process, analysts update the LCS, recording new authorizations as well as repeals, modifications, and extensions of previously cataloged authorizations. The LCS contains information about each authorization: the committees of jurisdiction, the public law or section of the U.S. Code that contains the authorization, the expiration date, and the latest amount authorized prior to expiration. Authorizations of appropriations that do not specify a dollar amount—for example, by authorizing “such sums as may be necessary” in their statutory text or by providing a lump sum for a multiyear period—are considered indefinite.

To ensure the reliability of data cataloged during the second phase, CBO is required by law to consult with the staff of Congressional committees. CBO shares a preliminary version of the data for the upcoming report and asks staff members to review items within each committee’s jurisdiction. That process helps CBO identify and correct errors in the LCS—particularly errors related to committees’ jurisdiction and the status of authorizations.

The goal of this phase is to ensure that the data related to authorizations are entered into the LCS in a way that helps analysts identify subsequent appropriations for those authorizations (if lawmakers allow them to expire). In some cases, authorizations are combined to make it easier for analysts to identify appropriations for a given program or activity. For example, large authorization bills—such as the annual National Defense Authorization Act and the biennial Water Resources Development Act—can contain hundreds of discrete authorizations of appropriations for a broad range of activities of a federal department or agency. CBO consolidates many of those authorizations in the LCS for consistency with the way related appropriations are typically provided. As a result, the number of expired or expiring authorizations indicated in the LCS can be smaller than the actual number of discrete authorizations contained in some laws.

By contrast, if there is ambiguity about whether two authorizations of appropriations may interact or overlap, both are included in the LCS. That way, each explicit authorization is cataloged as closely as possible to the way it appears in the law. However, that treatment may result in multiple entries for some amounts authorized to be appropriated. For example, if an explicit authorization of appropriations for a series of grant programs is in place and a new law establishes an explicit authorization for a specific type of grant, analysts may not be able to determine whether the new authorization is meant to be additive or to fall within the scope of the existing one. In that case, CBO catalogs both the new authorization and the existing one in the LCS, potentially causing the amount authorized to be counted more than once.

Phase 3: Identify Appropriations for Expired Authorizations

Once full-year appropriation acts for the fiscal year covered by the report are enacted, CBO begins the third phase of the process. The goal of this phase is to connect appropriations with expired authorizations. Analysts start by assessing the list of authorizations that have expired. Then they review all legislation that provides appropriations for the current fiscal year. Analysts also consult detailed tables that are sometimes provided by the House and Senate Committees on Appropriations and, when applicable, joint explanatory statements (JESs). (JESs usually accompany appropriation acts and further specify the allocation of budget authority at a more detailed level.)

The Congress did not produce an explanatory statement to accompany division A of the Full-Year Continuing Appropriations and Extensions Act, 2025 (P.L. 119-4), which provided full-year appropriations for federal agencies and activities funded through annual appropriation acts for 2025. Most of the appropriations provided by that law stem from section 1101, which continued most of the amounts and authorities contained in the 12 annual appropriation acts for fiscal year 2024.11 In some cases, other provisions (or anomalies) in P.L. 119-4 specified different amounts and authorities for fiscal year 2025. To identify 2025 appropriations for expired authorizations, CBO analysts did the following:

• Identified appropriations associated with expired authorizations they were able to link directly from the text of anomalies contained in P.L. 119-4;
• Identified appropriations associated with expired authorizations that were provided in statutory language of 2024 appropriation acts continued by section 1101 of P.L. 119-4; and
• As necessary for appropriations stemming from section 1101 of P.L. 119-4, considered the 2024 JES recommendations to apply in 2025 if the 2024 statement accounted for the total amount provided under a particular appropriation heading.12

CBO’s ability to make such connections is limited by the amount of detail provided in those laws and in related materials. Without a clear link, CBO cannot always associate an expired authorization with an appropriation—even if a federal agency could determine subsequently that appropriations are available for purposes covered by an expired authorization. In such cases, CBO might not identify those amounts in the LCS if the language of the authorization and the appropriation do not align completely. If authorizations overlap or interact, CBO tries to identify an appropriation for each authorization.

CBO aims to ensure consistency in the LCS’s records of appropriations for expired authorizations. When more than one appropriation is identified for a single expired authorization, the amounts are summed. If an appropriation can be associated with more than one authorization in the LCS, CBO links that appropriation with just one authorization.

Uncertainty of the Reported Estimates

Cataloging authorizations and identifying appropriations involves analysts’ judgment. For that reason, the estimates presented in this report are subject to uncertainty. For example, conventions described above for cataloging authorizations within the LCS that inadvertently understate or overstate the number of authorizations can skew both the number of expired authorizations with identified funding and the dollar amounts of appropriations provided for expired authorizations. Thus, this report should not be construed as providing precise information about the current state of authorizations and related appropriations. Likewise, uncertainty in the cataloging of authorizations and appropriations affects the accuracy of comparisons between datasets from year to year. Therefore, comparisons of data between one report and another indicate broad overall trends rather than precise year-to-year changes.

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1. 1. Congressional Budget Office, “Expired and Expiring Authorizations of Appropriations: 2025 Preliminary Report” (January 2025), www.cbo.gov/publication/60871.

2. 2. For definitions of some of the budgetary terms used in this report, see Congressional Budget Office, Common Budgetary Terms Explained (December 2021), www.cbo.gov/publication/57420.

3. 3. See clause 2(a)(1) of rule XXI, “General Appropriation Bills and Amendments,” of the Rules of the House of Representatives, H.R. Doc. 115-177 (2019), p. 871, https://tinyurl.com/53ethuav; and clause 1 of rule XVI, “Appropriations and Amendments to General Appropriations Bills,” of the Standing Rules of the Senate, S. Doc. 113-18 (January 2013), p. 11, https://tinyurl.com/cttpbya8.

4. 4. The LCS database is available in the workbook posted as supplemental data at www.cbo.gov/publication/61289. The data supersede preliminary data that did not associate appropriations with expired authorizations; see Congressional Budget Office, “Expired and Expiring Authorizations of Appropriations: 2025 Preliminary Report” (January 2025), www.cbo.gov/publication/60871.

5. 5. CBO typically references the explanatory statement that accompanies the appropriation legislation for the report year. However, for 2025, the Congress did not produce an explanatory statement. As explained later in this report, when applicable, the explanatory statements for fiscal year 2024 are referenced instead.

6. 6. Some of the expired and expiring authorizations identified for this report may have been reauthorized by legislation enacted after March 15, 2025.

7. 7. In identifying appropriations for this report, CBO reviewed all appropriation acts (enacted as of March 15, 2025) that provided funding for fiscal year 2025. Those acts include division A of the Full-Year Continuing Appropriations and Extensions Act, 2025 (P.L. 119-4); the American Relief Act, 2025 (P.L. 118-158); the Continuing Appropriations and Extensions Act, 2025 (P.L. 118-83); the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, 2022 (P.L. 117-159); and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (P.L. 117-58).

8. 8. Regardless of whether CBO could identify appropriations for this report, a federal agency may be able to determine that funding for 2025 is available for purposes covered by an expired authorization.

9. 9. For this edition of the report, a law counts as a major source of appropriations for expired authorizations if more than $3 billion in appropriations for 2024 or 2025 was identified for the law’s expired authorizations.

10. 10. If an authorization does not specify a particular expiration date but specifies a fiscal year, then CBO records September 30—the last day of the fiscal year—as the expiration date.

11. 11. The 12 regular annual appropriation acts for fiscal year 2024 were enacted as divisions A through F of the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2024 (P.L. 118-42), and divisions A through F of the Further Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2024 (P.L. 118-47).

12. 12. Section 1101 of P.L. 119-4 largely continued provisions of the 2024 appropriation acts (P.L. 118-42 and P.L. 118-47); the anomalies in P.L. 119-4 modified certain provisions of those laws.