Authorizations are laws that establish or continue the operation of federal agencies or programs. One type of authorization—broad enabling legislation—creates an agency, program, or activity and sets guidelines for how it will operate. A second type of authorization—an authorization of appropriations—provides explicit guidance to the Appropriations Committees on the amount of funding that lawmakers envision for a particular agency, program, or activity.

Authorizations of appropriations provide guidance on funding for many—but not all—authorized agencies, programs, and activities. That guidance may be permanent or may cover only a specific period and include an expiration date. Authorizations of appropriations sometimes appear later in the same statute that broadly authorizes the agency, program, or activity. They may also appear in subsequent laws amending the enabling statutes or in separately enacted legislation.

This report fulfills the Congressional Budget Office's statutory requirement to report to the Congress on all programs and activities funded for the current fiscal year whose authorizations of appropriations have expired as well as all programs and activities whose authorizations of appropriations will expire during the current fiscal year. (Those authorizations of appropriations with specified expiration dates are only a small subset of all authorizations in law.) The figure below illustrates the authorizations of appropriations that fall within the scope of this report, as depicted by the second-smallest circle in the figure.

Scope of CBO’s Final Report on Authorizations of Appropriations for Fiscal Year 2025

CBO tracks just the authorizations that fall within the scope of this report. The sizes of the circles and their partitions do not indicate the relative size of each group.

This final report updates CBO's preliminary report, released on January 15, 2025, which did not include information about appropriations provided for fiscal year 2025 for programs and activities with expired authorizations of appropriations because full-year appropriations were not yet enacted.

CBO identified 1,326 authorizations of appropriations that expired before the beginning of fiscal year 2025 and identified fiscal year 2025 appropriations—totaling $500 billion—associated with 457 of those expired authorizations. CBO also identified 304 authorizations that are set to expire before the end of fiscal year 2025. It is possible that appropriations other than those identified by CBO may be available to carry out programs and activities with expired authorizations.

CBO's annual reports are intended to aid the Congress by providing relevant information about expired or expiring authorizations, but they are not and should not be considered definitive with respect to the application of House or Senate rules about appropriating funds. House and Senate rules may restrict lawmakers from considering an appropriation if it lacks a current authorization. The determination of whether that is the case is made by the Speaker of the House or the Presiding Officer of the Senate on the basis of advice from the relevant chamber's Office of the Parliamentarian. Historically, the rules that would potentially strike proposed appropriations without authorizations from legislation have often been suspended or waived, thereby enabling those appropriations to be considered and adopted by the Congress.