The federal Highway Trust Fund ran a $21 billion cash deficit in fiscal year 2024, according to year-end reporting in the Monthly Treasury Statement that was released last Friday at 5 p.m. This is up from an $11.9 billion cash deficit in the prior year.

Receipts were flat (ever so slightly below FY 2023), but spending was up by an even $9 billion over last year, and reflects the cash flow from the large funding increases provided by the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act beginning to set in.

The new deficit level was $6.8 billion worse than had been forecast by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office in its June 2024 baseline:

Plugging those actual FY 2024 numbers into CBO’s June 10-year forecast, while leaving the rest of the forecast’s outlays and receipts constant, shows the Trust Fund as a whole ending fiscal year 2027 with a combined $17.7 billion positive balance, and running out of money sometime in 2028, with a year-end shortfall of -$17.7 billion.

However, we don’t know how those overall totals break down into the two separate accounts within the Trust Fund (Highway and Mass Transit). We will know that once the Federal Highway Administration does its monthly update to Table FE-1 in a few days.

But we don’t know how the $48.2 billion in FY24 receipts are broken down by type of tax (gasoline, diesel, truck sales, tires, HVUT) breaks down, because as of October 1, the Treasury Department is no longer making that information public on a monthly basis, as they have been doing since the 1990s. From now on, Treasury will only make that public in the Treasury Bulletin, in March of each year.

(We will have more complaints about Treasury’s decision to stop public reporting of trust fund financials on anything less than an annual basis next week.)