Criminal Law Library Blog
A Report from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO)*
October 26, 2026
“CBO explains the differences between revenues, outlays, and deficits in the federal budget and the corresponding measures of federal receipts, expenditures, and saving in the national income and product accounts.”
Summary:
The federal government’s fiscal transactions are recorded in two principal sets of accounts: The Budget of the U.S. Government (often called the federal budget), in which the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) records receipts and outlays resulting from laws enacted by Congress, and the national income and product accounts (NIPAs), which are produced by the Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA). The federal budget is the framework generally used by executive branch agencies and Congress to track agencies’ budgetary resources and their expenditures, oversee their activities, and implement legislation. The NIPAs, by contrast, are not intended to help the government plan or manage its activities. Instead, those accounts provide a general framework for measuring the economic activity of the United States as a whole, not just that of the federal government.
Each year, the Congressional Budget Office publishes projections of what federal revenues and outlays would be in the current fiscal year and over the next 10 years if laws governing taxes and spending generally remained unchanged. Those baseline budget projections reflect the standard structure for budgetary accounting and are consistent with OMB’s presentation of the budget. CBO translates those baseline projections of revenues and outlays into the NIPA framework, with its categories of current receipts and expenditures, to prepare the agency’s forecast of the economy. The agency regularly publishes those NIPA projections, along with reconciliations between them and its budget projections. This report explains the differences between the two frameworks seen in those reconciliations.
The projected budget totals under the two sets of accounts are similar but not identical because of differences in which transactions are recorded, which side of the ledger they are recorded on, and when they are recorded. (For example, federal investment is included in outlays in the budget, but it is not included in current expenditures in the NIPAs.) CBO’s baseline budget projections include federal deficits or surpluses, which are calculated by subtracting outlays from revenues. In the NIPAs, net federal government saving is calculated by subtracting current expenditures from current receipts. When current expenditures exceed current receipts, net federal government saving is negative and akin to a budget deficit.
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*Established in 1974, The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) is a federal agency within the legislative branch of the United States government. It is charged with providing members of Congress objective analysis of budgeting and economic issues to support the congressional budget process. Each year, CBO economists and budget analysts produce dozens of reports and hundreds of cost estimates for proposed legislation