What's in the FY 2023 Omnibus Bill?

 Update (2/3/2023): This piece has been updated with a more complete analysis of the bill as scored by the Congressional Budget Office.

Policymakers are considering the Fiscal Year (FY) 2023 omnibus appropriations bill this week, which sets appropriations levels and allocations for the remainder of the 2023 fiscal year. Based on the score from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), we estimate that the bill provides $1.646 trillion of non-emergency budget authority for FY 2023 – a $134 billion or 9 percent increase over FY 2022 levels. This increase would go above and beyond a simple inflation adjustment, with a real increase of about 3 percent. In addition, the bill provides $47 billion in supplemental funding for Ukraine and $38 billion for recent natural disasters while addressing expiring Medicare and Medicaid policies and enacting new tax incentives for retirement savings.

The FY 2023 omnibus is split between $858 billion for defense and $787 billion for nondefense discretionary programs. This includes $1.602 trillion of base appropriations when changes in mandatory programs (CHIMPs) and special adjustments are subtracted; CHIMPs in the bill total roughly $15 billion, and the remaining $28.5 billion of adjustments include spending for disaster relief, wildfire suppression, program integrity, the 21st Century Cures Act, and the Harbor Maintenance Trust Fund.

Each of the 12 appropriations bills included within the omnibus increase spending by amounts ranging from 1.4 percent for the Agriculture bill to 20.9 percent for the Military Construction-Veterans Affairs bill. The Legislative Branch bill also receives a double-digit percentage increase, while the other bills generally have increases in the range of 5 to 10 percent.

What's in the FY 2023 Omnibus?

Sources: Senate Appropriations Committee, House Appropriations Committee, Congressional Budget Office, Office of Management and Budget, CRFB calculations.

Note: Numbers may not add due to rounding.

Total budget authority authorized under the bill is $58 billion higher than projected for FY 2023 in CBO's most recent current law baseline, with more than 75 percent of that increase going to defense spending and less than 25 percent going to nondefense spending. Extrapolating forward, this would represent an increase of roughly half a trillion dollars in discretionary outlays over the next decade, though some of that would have already been projected due to higher inflation.

In addition to these appropriations, the bill provides $47.4 billion of supplemental funding for providing humanitarian, military, and economic assistance to Ukraine ($46.8 billion in outlays) and $38.0 billion in response to hurricanes and other natural disasters in 2022 ($36.8 billion in outlays). It also makes several smaller changes to health care and a few other programs that affect other mandatory spending, and it includes changes to tax incentives intended to increase retirement savings that are deficit neutral on paper but contain about $31 billion of steady-state costs due to gimmicks.

Additional  Policies in the FY 2023 Omnibus

Source: Congressional Budget Office, Joint Committee on Taxation, CRFB calcuations.

The FY 2023 omnibus goes above and beyond adjusting spending for today's high inflation, and it will likely only make inflation more difficult to tame. Going forward, lawmakers should instead adopt reasonable caps on discretionary spending – such as any of the options included in the CRFB Fiscal Blueprint – to stem further increases in the unsustainable national debt.