Budget

Julie Topoleski, CBO’s Director of Labor, Income Security, and Long-Term Analysis, testifies about CBO’s demographic projections before the Joint Economic Committee.

The U.S. faces a challenging fiscal outlook in the coming years, according to CBO's projections. Measured as a percentage of GDP, large and sustained deficits lead to high and rising federal debt that exceeds any previously recorded level.

Deficit reductions under the Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023 reduce projected federal debt in 2033 by about 3 percent, from $46.7 trillion (or 119 percent of gross domestic product, or GDP) to $45.2 trillion (or 115 percent of GDP).

CBO examines how the discretionary spending proposals in the President’s 2024 budget compare with CBO’s most recent baseline budget projections, which span 2023 to 2033.

CBO provides information about how its most recent budget projections would change under different assumptions about future legislated policies.

CBO’s updated projections show a federal budget deficit of $1.5 trillion for 2023. That estimate is subject to considerable uncertainty, though, in part because of a recent shortfall in tax revenues.

CBO projects that if the debt limit remains unchanged, there is a significant risk that at some point in the first two weeks of June, the government will no longer be able to pay all of its obligations.

To show how variations in economic conditions might affect its budget projections, CBO analyzed how revenues, outlays, and deficits might change if the values of key economic variables differed from those in the agency’s forecast.

In this report, CBO uses various measures to assess the quality of its past projections of federal outlays. The analysis focuses on three fiscal years within each projection period: the budget year, the 6th year, and the 11th year.

The Congressional Budget Act of 1974 requires CBO to prepare estimates of the cost of legislation at certain points in the legislative process. This document provides answers to questions about how CBO prepares those cost estimates.

The Congressional Budget Act of 1974 requires CBO to produce an annual report on federal spending, revenues, and deficits or surpluses. This document provides answers to questions about how CBO prepares those baseline budget projections.

View CBO’s budget infographics to see how much the federal government spent and took in during fiscal year 2022, as well as broader trends in the budget over the past few decades.

In CBO’s projections, the federal deficit totals $1.4 trillion in 2023 and averages $2.0 trillion per year from 2024 to 2033. Real GDP growth comes to a halt in 2023 and then rebounds, averaging 2.4 percent from 2024 to 2027.

CBO issues a volume describing 17 policy options that would each reduce the federal budget deficit by more than $300 billion over the next 10 years or, in the case of Social Security options, have a comparably large effect in later decades.

CBO issues a volume that contains short descriptions of 59 policy options that would each reduce the federal budget deficit by less than $300 billion over the next 10 years.

CBO projects the budgetary effects of automatic stabilizers—as well as the size of deficits without them—from 2022 to 2032 and provides historical estimates of the stabilizers’ effects since 1972.

Under the President’s proposals, the cumulative deficit for the 2023-2032 period would be $2.6 trillion smaller than it is in CBO’s baseline projections because revenues would be higher and spending lower.

In this report, CBO examines the mechanisms by which quantitative easing — large asset purchasing programs conducted by the Federal Reserve— affects the federal budget deficit.

This guide briefly explains—in plain language—the differences between some common budgetary terms.

From the end of 2008 to 2019, the amount of federal debt held by the public nearly tripled. This report describes federal debt, various ways to measure it, CBO’s projections for the coming decade, and the consequences of its growth.