Zooming out and looking over the history of the budget back to 2016 shows a more complete picture. The change since Covid is quite dramatic. In 2019, the deficit was $1.02T. In 2025, it was $1.66T.

The federal budget deficit totaled $1.7 trillion in Calendar Year (CY) 2025, according to estimates from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). The deficit in CY 2025 is $369 billion less than the ...

Another challenge is that fraud is not easy to root out entirely. Historically, "only a small percentage of tax dollars lost to fraud are ever actually recovered by the government," said Bob ...

This figure, while still denoting a deficit, is a slight improvement compared to the previous month’s deficit of -$173.0B.

The United States borrowed $601 billion in the first three months of Fiscal Year (FY) 2026, including $143 billion in December, according to the latest ...

The December budget deficit came in at $144.75 billion, a record for the month and 68 percent higher than last year.

The U.S. Treasury Department released the latest Monthly Treasury Statement on Tuesday, Jan. 13, revealing that the federal ...

In Then and Now: A Look Back and Ahead at the Federal Budget (NBER Working Paper 34455), Alan J. Auerbach and William Gale develop fiscal projections that incorporate the recently enacted One Big ...

The Rules Committee must suggest rule changes to help meet the target, including making budget rules more difficult to waive ...

The federal budget gap narrowed more sharply than forecasters anticipated in November, offering a rare piece of good news in a fiscal landscape still dominated by red ink. The monthly shortfall came ...

Discover how the U.S. federal budget works, its role in government spending, and its historical evolution, including details ...