On Monday, March 14, four days after Congress had passed the omnibus appropriations bill for fiscal 2022 and sent it to the President, the Congressional Budget Office released its official estimate of how much money was actually in the bill.
CBO determined that the twelve general appropriations bills in Divisions A through L of the package totaled $1.497 trillion in net budget authority, as follows:
- $782.2 billion in regular defense appropriations,
- $688.7 billion in regular non-defense appropriations, and
- $26.2 billion in miscellaneous non-defense appropriations for things like the FEMA Disaster Relief Fund, wildfire suppression on federal lands, disability and health care fraud enforcement, and the Harbor Maintenance Trust Fund that aren’t counted towards “base” appropriations levels.
The totals from CBO are slightly different than those we generated and ran with last week. The base defense number is a 5.6 percent increase over fiscal 2021 (+$41.7 billion), and the base non-defense increase is an 8.5 percent increase (+$54.2 billion).
In addition, Division N of the bill provided $13.6 billion in emergency appropriations for Ukraine, which was added to $207.8 billion in emergency appropriations for fiscal 2022 enacted in earlier legislation (mostly the infrastructure bill, which provided $163.0 billion of that money).
Then, there were a lot of other non-Appropriations bills in the omnibus package, some of which will have effects on federal outlays and revenues. CBO estimates that, collectively, these will increase federal outlays by $604 million over the next ten years and will also increase federal revenues by $456 million over that same period, for a total deficit increase of $148 million.
($148 million would be quite a lot of money to you or me, but it’s only one ten-thousandth as much as was appropriated for one year by Divisions A through L of the bill.)
We have updated our meticulously maintained subcommittee-level table to show the final CBO score of the FY22 omnibus. We keep the prior years back to fiscal year 2017 to show how, when President Trump came into office, the budget deal he negotiated with Congress for fiscal 2018 blew the doors off the Appropriations Committee, ending years of Budget Control Act “austerity.”