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.

State FY15 Tax Update

On September 27, 2015 usgovernmentspending.com updated FY2015 state revenue with quarterly tax data from the US Census Bureau.  Local tax data was updated by assuming that local taxes for 2015 changed by the same percent as state taxes of the same type.

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.