Prospects for DOD’s Budget Over the Next Decade

Presentation by Sarah Puro, Principal Analyst in CBO’s Budget Analysis Division, at the Annual Conference of the National Federation of Municipal Analysts. The Fixing America’s Surface Transportation Act, which was signed into law on December 4, 2015, provided $281 billion in contract authority for surface transportation programs through 2020. But projected spending from the Highway Trust Fund exceeds its revenues. Under current law, CBO estimates that the Highway Account of the Highway Trust Fund will be able to meet obligations through 2021 and the Transit Account through 2020. Some proposals involve establishing a new entity to finance infrastructure investments. However, even if such an entity is not officially a federal agency, its activity might be considered part of the federal budget.

The document summarizes a presentation given by James Baumgardner from the Congressional Budget Office at the 2015 Health Care Forecast Conference. It discusses CBO analyses and projections regarding premium support options in Medicare, federal budget and deficit projections, the long-term budget outlook, and the impact of various policy alternatives on spending and debt levels. The slides analyze factors like the aging population, rising health care costs, and the timing and scale of policy changes needed to control the growth of federal debt.

Presentation on Capitol Hill in a Panel Discussion with Local Leaders, by Sarah Puro, Principal Analyst, Budget Analysis Division, Congressional Budget Office

For its baseline budget projections, CBO estimates the revenue effects of enacted legislation that changed the amount of funding for tax enforcement. Similarly, CBO’s annual analysis of the President’s budget includes its estimates of the revenue effects of the Administration’s proposals to change such funding. (But CBO does not estimate the changes in revenue from proposals to amend the tax code; those estimates are the responsibility of the staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation.) However, for legislation being considered by the Congress, CBO does not include projections of additional receipts from proposed increases in funding for tax enforcement in its estimates of the budgetary effects that are used for budget enforcement purposes. That approach follows the budget scorekeeping guidelines specified in the conference report for the Balanced Budget Act of 1997. These slides describe the circumstances under which CBO estimates the revenue effects of changes in funding for tax enforcement and the factors that affect those estimates. They were the basis for a presentation by Janet Holtzblatt, a unit chief in CBO's Tax Analysis Division, at the sixth annual Internal Revenue Service-Tax Policy Center Joint Research Conference on Tax Administration.

On April 12, 2016, CBO Deputy Director Robert Sunshine presented at the 8th Annual Meeting of OECD Parliamentary Budget Officials and Independent Fiscal Institutions. The OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) defines fiscal transparency as the full disclosure of all relevant fiscal information in a timely and systematic manner. Each year, CBO produces numerous products that provide such information to the Congress, and through its website, to other interested parties and the general public. This presentation describes several of those products.

Presentation by Chad Shirley, CBO’s Deputy Assistant Director for Microeconomic Studies, at the Transportation Policy & Finance Summit of the International Bridge, Tunnel and Turnpike Association (IBTTA). Federal spending on highways (or, synonymously, roads) totaled $46 billion in 2014, roughly a quarter of total public spending on highways. But that spending does not correspond very well with how the roads are used and valued. This presentation illustrates how spending on highways is related to their use and performance, and it examines three approaches that the Congress could consider to make highway spending more productive.