Outlook for the Budget and the Economy
- Report
Interim Economic Projections for 2020 and 2021
CBO estimates that real gross domestic product will contract by 11 percent in the second quarter of this year, which is equivalent to a decline of 38 percent at an annual rate, and that the number of people employed will be almost 26 million lower than the number in the fourth quarter of 2019.
- Working Paper
CBO's Oil Price Forecasting Record: Working Paper 2020-03
Oil prices are one of the economic variables that underlie CBO's projections of the federal budget. This paper describes CBO's methods to forecast oil prices and evaluates the quality of the agency's historical forecasts.
- Presentation
CBO’s Current Economic Projections and a Preliminary Look at Federal Deficits and Debt for 2020 and 2021
Presentation by Phillip Swagel, CBO’s Director, to the Committee on the Budget, U.S. House of Representatives.
- Blog Post
CBO’s Current Projections of Output, Employment, and Interest Rates and a Preliminary Look at Federal Deficits for 2020 and 2021
CBO discusses its preliminary projections of key economic variables and its preliminary assessments of federal budget deficits and debt through 2021. The amounts include the effects of legislation enacted in response to the pandemic.
- Blog Post
CBO Releases Infographics About the Federal Budget in Fiscal Year 2019
View CBO’s budget infographics to see how much the federal government spent and took in during fiscal year 2019, as well as broader trends in the budget over the past few decades.
- Graphic
Discretionary Spending in 2019: An Infographic
Discretionary spending by the federal government totaled $1.3 trillion in 2019—about half for national defense and half for nondefense activities.
- Graphic
Mandatory Spending in 2019: An Infographic
Mandatory spending by the federal government totaled $2.7 trillion in 2019, of which $1.7 trillion was for Social Security and Medicare.
- Graphic
Revenues in 2019: An Infographic
Revenues received by the federal government in 2019 totaled $3.5 trillion, of which $1.7 trillion was receipts from individual income taxes.
- Report
Estimates of the Cost of Federal Credit Programs in 2021
Using FCRA procedures, CBO estimates that new loans and loan guarantees issued in 2021 would result in savings of $41.8 billion. But using fair-value estimates, CBO projects that they would have a lifetime cost of $46.8 billion.
- Blog Post
Updating CBO’s Economic Forecast to Account for the Pandemic
As a result of the continued disruption of commerce stemming from the coronavirus pandemic, CBO expects the unemployment rate to exceed 10 percent as gross domestic product declines during the second quarter.