Wednesday, October 30, 2013

Federal Deficit Announced for FY 2013

On October 30, 2013, the US Treasury reported in its Monthly Treasury Statement for September that the federal deficit for FY13 ending September 30 was $680 billion. Here are the numbers, including total receipts, total outlays, and deficit compared with the numbers projected in the FY 14 federal budget published in February 2013:

Federal Finances
FY13 Outcomes
Budget
billions
CBO
  billions
Treasury
billions
Receipts $2,712$2,774$2,774
Outlays$3,685$3,454$3,454
Deficit$973$680$680

usfederalbudget.us now shows the new numbers for total FY13 outlays and receipts on its Estimate vs. Actual page, but will not update detailed FY2013 numbers until the FY2015 federal budget is published in February 2014.

UPDATED 11/7/2013:

The Congressional Budget Office announced FY13 outcomes on November 7, 2013.  CBO reported that almost half of the reduction in FY2013 outlays from the budgeted $3,685 billion to $3,454 billion was due to payments from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to the US Treasury.
First, Fannie Mae made a onetime payment to the Treasury of around $50 billion resulting from a revaluation of certain tax assets that significantly increased its net worth. Second, because both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were profitable in 2013, the companies were required to make quarterly payments to the Treasury in amounts related to the increase in their net worth.
The Monthly Treasury Statement includes "Table 9. Summary of Receipts by Source, and Outlays by Function of the U.S. Government, September 2013 and Other Periods".   This table of outlays by function makes it possible for usgovernmentspending.com to estimate outlays by "subfunction" for FY2013 by factoring budgeted amounts by the difference between budgeted and actual "function" amounts where actual outlays by subfunction cannot be gleaned from the Monthly Treasury Statement.  But this method does not work for Function "370 Commerce and Housing Credit".  Budgeted outlay was $17.7 billion and actual outlay was minus $83.5 billion.  We assume this is due to the special payments from the GSEs, and so we have allocated most of the difference to subfunction "371 Mortgage credit".

Final outlays by subfunction will appear after the federal budget for FY2015 is published in early 2014.