June 2011

  • In most years, the Department of Defense (DoD) provides a five- or six-year plan, called the Future Years Defense Program (FYDP), associated with the budget it submits to the Congress. Because decisions made in the near term can have consequences for the defense budget well beyond that period, CBO—at the request of the Senate Budget Committee—has examined the programs and plans contained in DoD's latest FYDP (issued in April 2011) and projected their budgetary impact in subsequent years.

  • This morning I testified before the House Budget Committee on our long-term budget outlook that was released yesterday. In that testimony, I highlighted many of the points that were included in my blog post from yesterday. In this blog, I will discuss, in more detail, the main factors that account for the projected increases in outlays for Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid: aging of the population and rising health care costs.

  • CBO's latest summary of the ship inventory goals and purchases described in the Navy’s 2012 plan

  • Recently, the federal government has been recording budget deficits that are the largest as a share of the economy since 1945. Consequently, the amount of federal debt held by the public has surged. By the end of this year, CBO projects, federal debt will reach roughly 70 percent of gross domestic product (GDP)the highest percentage since shortly after World War II. As the economy continues to recover and the policies adopted to counteract the recession phase out, budget deficits will probably decline markedly in the next few years.

  • As required by the Unfunded Mandates Reform Act of 1995 (UMRA), CBO reviews nearly all legislation approved by authorizing committees of the Congress to identify mandates that the legislation would impose on state, local, or tribal governmentsknown as intergovernmental mandatesor on the private sector. In March 2011, CBO released its annual report on UMRA, which summarizes mandates that appeared in legislation considered by the Congress during 2010 and in public laws enacted in that year.

  • I spoke last week with a group of reporters who gather regularly for breakfast at the invitation of the Christian Science Monitor. The conversation touched on a number of issues, but I would like to focus on three of those.

  • I was pleased to talk last Thursday at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. I began my presentation by showing that, under current tax and spending policies, federal debt held by the public would be roughly equal to our annual economic output by the end of the decadea level that has been exceeded in the United States during only a few years in the 1940s.

  • Unmanned aircraft systems have long held great promise for military operations, but technology has only recently matured enough to exploit that potential. The Department of Defense (DoD) has published detailed, unclassified plans to purchase over the next ten years about 730 new medium-sized and large unmanned aircraft systems that are designed for reconnaissance and light attack missions. CBO estimates that completing those investments would cost about $37 billion through 2020.

  • The federal budget deficit is $929 billion for the first eight months of fiscal year 2011, CBO estimates in its latest Monthly Budget Review—$6 billion less than the shortfall recorded over the same period last year. For the first two-thirds of the year, outlays are about 6 percent higher and revenues are about 10 percent higher than they were last year at this time.

  • In 2009, about 39 million foreign-born people lived in the United States, making up more than 12 percent of the U.S. populationthe largest share since 1920. Naturalized citizens (foreign-born people who have fulfilled the requirements of U.S. citizenship) accounted for about 17 million of the total. Noncitizens (foreign-born people authorized to live and work in the United States either temporarily or permanently and people who are not authorized to live or work in the United States) accounted for about 22 million of the total.