One law, one information date
For each enacted law, the project identifies the authoritative CBO estimate available when the law was passed.
This isolates newly enacted fiscal policy.Fiscal expectations
Tracking how the fiscal outlook changes in real time
The project converts CBO cost estimates for individual enacted laws into fiscal-year paths of expected revenues and outlays, reconciles those paths with successive CBO baselines, and asks how professional forecasts and debt values respond to the same fiscal news.
Work in progress · Paper to be postedWhat the project adds
A ten-year budget score becomes a dated fiscal path
A single budget total hides when borrowing changes and whether it changes through revenues or spending. The reconstruction retains both timing and composition.
Timing remains visible
Expected revenue and outlay effects are recovered for each fiscal year rather than reduced to one ten-year total.
This shows when a law changes borrowing needs.Taxes and spending remain separate
Revenue changes, direct spending, regular appropriations, and emergency spending are kept distinct.
Equal ten-year totals can imply very different fiscal paths.Laws connect to the full outlook
Law-level effects are aggregated into legislative fiscal news and reconciled with successive CBO baselines, apart from economic and technical revisions.
This links individual laws to the expected primary-surplus path.Projections versus outcomes
Realized primary deficits exceed earlier fiscal paths on average.
Each colored line combines the latest CBO current-law baseline with legislation already scored when the path was formed. The black line shows the realized primary deficit. The average gap grows from about $337 billion one year ahead to $772 billion five years ahead and $1.25 trillion ten years ahead.
What the gap means: it is a fiscal disappointment relative to the information used to construct each path, not a pure CBO forecasting error. Later legislation and subsequent economic or technical revisions can all widen it.
Separating policy change from forecast error
A projection can miss for three different reasons
The reconstruction separates later legislation from economic and technical revisions before interpreting the difference between a forecast and the eventual outcome.
Later legislation
New laws enacted after a forecast change revenues and spending. Those changes were not part of the original current-law path.
Economic revisions
New expectations for growth, inflation, interest rates, and other economic conditions alter the budget path.
Technical revisions
New program data and estimating updates change projected revenues or spending even when laws and macroeconomic assumptions do not.
Fiscal backdrop · CBO long-term outlooks
CBO’s long-run primary-surplus outlook has remained negative since 2013.
The 2025 CBO curve averages a projected primary deficit of about 1.9% of GDP over years 10 through 30. Every long-term outlook in the series since 2013 projects a negative average primary balance.
-1.9%2025 long-run primary balance, years 10–30
Since 2013every outlook projects a negative long-run average
Context: these aggregate CBO outlooks describe the backdrop. The project’s distinctive contribution is to connect changes in that outlook to individual laws and information dates.
What the reconstruction enables
The same fiscal news links forecast revisions to debt value
A common event-level measure makes the path from legislation to economic expectations and Treasury valuation observable.
01
Fiscal-news path
Each law produces a dated path of expected revenue and outlay changes by fiscal year.
02
Forecast response
The same news is matched to professional forecast revisions for the same target and horizon.
03
Valuation pass-through
Expected yields and inflation imply a real Treasury portfolio value that can be compared with fiscal backing over a matched horizon.