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.

US, State Population Update for 2015

On December 22, 2015 the US Census Bureau released its national and state population estimates for July 1, 2015.  On December 22, 2015 usgovernmentspending.com updated its US and state population data as follows:

• We updated 2010-2015 population data for US and states using data from US Census Bureau Population Estimates: vintage 2015 in file NST-EST2015-01.xlsx.
• We projected 2016 thru 2020 for US and states assuming population rate change for 2014-15.
• We updated 2016 thru 2020 for US using data from US Census Bureau 2014 National Population Projections in file NP2014-T1.xls.

usgovernmentspending.com uses population data in computing per capita spending and revenue data. You can see per capita spending data in a chart here, and in a table of spending here.

You can check the data update schedule here.

Federal Deficit and Outlay Actuals for FY15

On October 15, 2015, the US Treasury reported in its Monthly Treasury Statement (and xls) for September that the federal deficit for FY 2015 ending September 30 was $439 billion. Here are the numbers, including total receipts, total outlays, and deficit compared with the numbers projected in the FY 2016 federal budget published in February 2015:

Federal Finances FY 2015 Outcomes
	Budget billions	Outcome billions
Receipts	$3,176	$3,249
Outlays	$3,759	$3,688
Deficit	$583	$439

usfederalbudget.us now shows the new numbers for total FY 2015 outlays and receipts on its Estimate vs. Actual page.

The Monthly Treasury Statement includes ""Table 4: Receipts of the United States Government, September 2015 and Other Periods." This table of receipts by source is used for usgovernmentspending.com to post federal receipt actuals for FY 2015.

The Monthly Treasury Statement includes "Table 9. Summary of Receipts by Source, and Outlays by Function of the U.S. Government, September 2015 and Other Periods".   This table of outlays by function makes it possible for usgovernmentspending.com to estimate actual outlays by "subfunction" for FY 2015 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.

Final detailed FY 2015 numbers will not appear until the FY 2017 federal budget is published in February 2016 with the actual outlays for FY 2015 in Historical Table 3.2--Outlays by Function and Subfunction.