State and Local Finances Update for FY 2013

On February 1, 2016 usgovernmentspending.com learned that the US Census Bureau may not continue distributing a "flat file" of state and local finances, but only publish a summary of state and local finances.

So we have adapted our state and local finance process to extract the necessary data from the summary files published at the Bureau's State and Local Finance page. Briefly, this means that many detail functions, such as elementary education, are compressed to a single data item instead of two or three.

On February 6, 2016 we updated the state and local spending and revenue for FY 2013 using the newly Census Bureau State and Local Government Finances summaries for FY 2013 released in Fall 2015.  This includes state and local spending for the United States as a whole and individual states and the District of Columbia.

State and local spending and revenue for FY2013 are now actual historical spending as reported by the Census Bureau.  Previously state spending and revenue for FY2013 was actual and local spending and revenue was estimated.  The following table shows the difference between estimated and actual local spending and revenue for FY2013:

FY 2013	Estimated $ billion	Actual $ billion
Local Spending	$1,601	$1,684
Local Revenue	$1,094	$1,169

We will update the "guesstimated" state and local finances for FY2014-20 after the FY2017 federal budget update.