Federal "Agency Debt" Added

The federal government of the United States does not include all its borrowing in the US Treasury tally of public debt, such as the Debt to the Penny web page. There is also the so-called “agency debt” which is mostly not included in the total of the "national debt." This agency debt is substantial.

The Federal Reserve Board reports a the level of agency debt in its periodical Financial Accounts of the United States. "Table L.211 Agency- and GSE-Backed Securities" includes line items for "Government-sponsored enterprises" and for "Agency- and GSE-backed mortgage pools."

A footnote to Table L.211 states the following:

Agency- and GSE-backed securities include: issues of federal budget agencies (line 2) such as those for the TVA; issues of government sponsored enterprises (line 3) such as Fannie Mae and FHLB; and agency- and GSE-backed mortgage pool securities issued by GNMA, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the Farmers Home Administration (line 4). Only the budget agency issues are considered officially to be part of the total debt of the federal government, which is shown in table L.106, line 20.

usgovernmentspending.com has extracted line 3 and line 4 data for agency debt from the FRB database for the period 1945-2014. You can see our Agency Debt page here, and a comparison with the official "on-the-books" debt here.

For the period 2015 to 2020 usgovernmentspending.com has "guesstimated" the agency debt, assuming that it increases at the same rate as it did in 2013 to 2014.