CBO’s Projections of Federal Receipts and Expenditures in the National Income and Product Accounts: 2025 to 2034

The federal government's fiscal transactions are recorded in two major sets of accounts: The Budget of the United States Government (often called the federal budget), which is prepared by the Office of Management and Budget, and the national income and product accounts (NIPAs), which are produced by the Department of Commerce's Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA). The federal budget is the framework generally used by executive branch agencies and the Congress to track agencies' budgetary resources and their expenditures, oversee their activities, and implement legislation. The NIPAs, by contrast, are not intended to help the government plan or manage its activities. Instead, those accounts provide a general framework for describing the entire U.S. economy, rather than the federal government specifically.

Each year, the Congressional Budget Office publishes projections of federal revenues and outlays for the current fiscal year and the next 10 years. Those baseline budget projections reflect the standard structure for budgetary accounting. This report offers additional assistance to analysts and forecasters examining the entire U.S. economy by presenting CBO's projections of revenues and outlays for the 2025–2034 period in the NIPA framework and its categories of current receipts and expenditures.

The projected budget totals under the two sets of accounts are similar but not identical. Because of conceptual differences, for the 2025–2034 period, cumulative current receipts in the NIPAs exceed projected revenues in CBO's baseline by about 5 percent, and current expenditures in the NIPAs exceed projected outlays in the baseline by about 3 percent.

CBO's baseline budget projections include federal deficits or surpluses, which are calculated by subtracting outlays from revenues. In the NIPAs, net federal government saving is calculated by subtracting current expenditures from current receipts. When current expenditures exceed current receipts—as they do throughout the projection period—the amount of net federal government saving is negative and akin to a budget deficit.

The projected amount of negative federal saving for 2025 is $1.9 trillion. Negative federal saving remains less than that through 2028, reaches $2.0 trillion in 2029, and then grows to $2.8 trillion in 2034. Deficits in CBO's baseline budget projections follow a similar pattern: In 2025, the deficit amounts to $1.9 trillion. Deficits shrink slightly before returning to that amount in 2028 and 2029; they grow thereafter, reaching $2.9 trillion in 2034. Over the 2025–2034 period, the amount of negative federal saving, which totals $21.5 trillion, is projected to be slightly less than the cumulative deficit, which totals $22.1 trillion.