Report: CBO's Analysis of the President’s FY 2016 Budget

Today, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released its re-estimate of the President’s FY 2016 budget, using its own economic and technical assumptions. While CBO generally shows lower debt in the near term than the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) did, it also shows debt on a slight upward path as a share of GDP after 2020. Thus, it is less likely that the budget would stabilize debt over the long term, as OMB’s projections showed.

According to CBO, debt held by the public in the President’s budget would reach 73.1 percent of GDP by 2025, 1 percentage point lower than in 2014 (and about what OMB estimated), but 1 percentage point higher than in 2020. In dollars, debt would rise from about $13.1 trillion today to $20.1 trillion by 2025.

CBO projects debt under the President’s budget would be $1.1 trillion lower than in CBO’s current law baseline in 2025. Those savings can be mostly attributed to two factors: increased revenue and reductions in war spending that are largely already expected to occur.

CBO projects annual deficits would fall from $486 billion (2.7 percent of GDP) in 2015 to $380 billion (2.0 percent of GDP) in 2016 before rising in every subsequent year to over $800 billion (2.9 percent of GDP) by 2025. Both spending and revenue will be growing as a share of GDP over this period, but spending will increase slightly faster, from 20.5 percent in 2015 to 22.1 percent in 2025, while revenue will rise from 17.8 percent to 19.2 percent. These increases are the result of both current law trends and policy changes proposed in the President’s budget.

CBO estimates deficits through 2025 will be $206 billion higher under the President’s budget than OMB estimates, with more than the entire difference ($345 billion) coming from differences in economic projections. In the other direction, $139 billion of technical differences reduced deficits relative to what OMB estimated. In addition, using CBO’s GDP instead of OMB’s results in the 2025 debt-to-GDP ratio being one percentage point higher.

Ultimately, CBO shows that while the President’s budget responsibly offsets its new spending, it does not go far enough in reducing the debt to ensure fiscal sustainability over the long term.

Read the full paper below, or download a printer-friendly version here.