The U.S. budget deficit has grown to more than $1.3 trillion in the first half of the 2025 fiscal year — the second highest six-month deficit on record, according to Treasury Department data released Thursday.
The deficit for October through March spans the administrations of President Joe Biden and President Donald Trump. The previous high in the four decades of recordkeeping was $1.7 trillion in the first half of fiscal year 2021, when the government was tackling the COVID-19 pandemic.
A Treasury official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to preview the data said the increased spending was in part due to a mix of expenditures, including cost of living increases to Social Security payouts, higher Medicare and Medicaid costs, increased disaster assistance to the Federal Emergency Management Agency and Defense Department spending.
Jacob Bogage at WP:
Senior tax officials are bracing for a sharp drop in revenue collected this spring, as an increasing number of individuals and businesses spurn filing their taxes or attempt to skip paying balances owed to the Internal Revenue Service, according to three people with knowledge of tax projections.
Treasury Department and IRS officials are predicting a decrease of more than 10 percent in tax receipts by the April 15 deadline compared with 2024, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share nonpublic data. That would amount to more than $500 billion in lost federal revenue; the IRS collected $5.1 trillion last year. For context, the U.S. government spent $825 billion on the Defense Department in fiscal 2024.
“The idea of doing that in one year, it’s hard to grapple with how meaningful of a shift that represents,” said Natasha Sarin, president of the Yale Budget Lab and a senior Biden administration tax official.
