2026年联邦信贷计划成本估算

The federal government supports some private activitiesby offering credit assistance to individuals and businesses.That assistance is provided through direct loans and guar-antees of loans made by private financial institutions. Inthis report, the Congressional Budget Office estimates the savethe federal government $13.3 billion; on a fair-value basis, they wouldcostthe federal government •Loans and loan guarantees made by the Departmentof Housing and Urban Development (HUD).On aFCRA basis, those loans and guarantees are projectedtosave$6.8 billion; on a fair-value basis, they would Those lifetime costs can be calculated in two ways. Oneway uses procedures specified in the Federal CreditReform Act of 1990 (FCRA), and the other is based on ameasure of fair value. Using FCRA procedures—the stan-dard way in which costs of credit programs are measuredin the federal budget—CBO estimates that new loansand loan guarantees issued in 2026 would save the federalgovernment $12.5 billion over their lifetime. Using thefair-value approach, which measures the market value ofthe government’s obligations by accounting for market •Student loans made by the Department ofEducation.Those loans are projected to cost On both a FCRA and a fair-value basis, loans made bythe Department of Education have by far the largest sub-sidy costs. The next largest costs are for credit assistance In this analysis, the FCRA estimates for the largest federalcredit programs and all of the fair-value estimates wereproduced by CBO. The rest of the FCRA estimates wereproduced by other federal agencies. Federal Programs That ProvideCredit Assistance For this report, CBO analyzed the 104 programs throughwhich the federal government provides credit assistance.Of those 104 programs, 88 are discretionary, whichmeans they are funded through annual appropriationacts. The remaining 16 are mandatory programs andother commitments. For those programs, lawmakers Nearly two-thirds of the difference between those FCRAand fair-value estimates is attributable to three sources: •Guarantees made by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.Analyzed on a FCRA basis, those guarantees would The total amount of federal credit assistance projectedfor 2026 is $1.9 trillion, consisting of new directloans that total $183 billion and new guarantees thatcover $1.7 trillion in loans. Most federal credit assis-tance—89 percent of the total amount—is provided bythe few programs that offer mortgage guarantees andstudent loans. By far, the largest federal credit pro- How CBO Projects Subsidy Costs To compute the estimates in this analysis, CBO used itsown projections of the volume of loans and cash flowsfor the largest credit programs: Fannie Mae’s and FreddieMac’s MBS guarantee programs, FHA’s single-familymortgage and reverse-mortgage guarantee programs,VA’s mortgage guarantee program, and the Departmentof Education’s student loan programs. Making such grams are those of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, twogovernment-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) that guarantee Mandatory programs and commitments account for71 percent of the total projected dollar value of fed-eral loans and loan guarantees in 2026. The largest ofthe mandatory programs that CBO analyzed are theDepartment of Education’s student loan programsand the mortgage guarantee program administered by For smaller federal credit programs, which are mostlyfunded by discretionary appropriations, CBO generallyprojects that subsidy costs would grow at the rate ofinflation—the same approach the agency uses to pro- ject most discretionary appropriations under currentlaw.5Because CBO does not estimate cash flows forthose smaller credit programs, their estimated subsidycosts are based on cash flow estimates prepared by theAdministration, which reflect the President’s proposed Discretionary programs account for the remaining29 percent of the projected dollar value of loans and loanguarantees in 2026. The largest discretionary programsare the mortgage programs administered by the FederalHousing Administration (FHA), which is part of HUD, Various factors can alter the projected volume of loansand cash flows, including policy changes, the availabilityof more recent data, new estimating methods, changesin economic conditions, and changing characteristicsof participants in programs. CBO and the agencies thatproduce FCRA estimates have updated many of their and the Department of Agriculture’s Rural Housing projections for 2025 since August 2024, when CBOlast published its estimates of the costs of federal credit 3.Although funding for the Department of Energy’s Title 17 loanprograms for innovative technologies is discretionary, thoseprograms are also operating with mandatory authority provided 6.Congressional Budget Office,Estimates of the Cost of FederalCredit Programs in 2025(August 2024),www.cbo.gov/ purposes of comparison, this analysis includes bothFCRA and fair-value estimates. The differences betweenthe two sets of estimates—which