WASHINGTON — The U.S. budget deficit widened to a record-high $864 billion last month due to the federal government’s extraordinary response to the coronavirus pandemic, the Treasury Department said on Monday.
In June 2019, the budget deficit was just $8 billion.
Federal spending rose to more than $1.1 trillion in June, more than twice what the U.S. government spends in a typical month. The amount of tax revenue collected by the federal government remained largely flat, at about $240 billion, in part because the Treasury Department delayed the tax filing deadline until July.
The huge surge in June pushed the budget deficit for the first nine months of the fiscal year to $2.7 trillion.
June’s deficit figures highlights just how much havoc the coronavirus pandemic has wreaked on U.S. budgeting. In prior years, the federal deficit was considered large when it approached or eclipsed $1 trillion for an entire year. America spent about $2 trillion more than it took in in tax revenue from April to June alone.
Congress in March approved $2 trillion in spending that took several months to take effect as the economy contracted due to the pandemic. Those efforts included larger benefits for unemployed Americans; $1,200 stimulus payments; and small business relief. Economists say that funding was badly needed to prevent tens of millions of Americans from being hurt by the pandemic, and that more remains necessary.
“Big government deficits are the only thing keeping the U.S. economy on life support and anti-deficit rhetoric threatens to pull the plug,” said Nathan Tankus, research director of the Modern Money Network. “The alternative is mass defaults, evictions and bankruptcies which will devastate the United States.”
The big increase in the deficit from May to June is largely due to an accounting change related to the more than $500 billion in small business aid approved by Congress through the Paycheck Protection Program. Previously, Treasury did not count the PPP’s forgivable loans as spending, but that changed from April to June. Most of the PPP loans to companies are expected to be forgiven and paid off by the government.
Some budget experts believe U.S. spending will have to be cut after the economy improves. The current deficit is more than triple what was lodged over the same period last year. Before the pandemic, the previous biggest one-month deficit in the U.S. was $234 billion.
“Today’s record deficits are mainly a product of our response to the current pandemic – once the economy recovers we need to get our deficit under control,” said Marc Goldwein, senior vice president at the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.
Numerous White House officials and conservative Republican lawmakers have expressed frustration with the amount of spending approved by Congress and stressed caution over further efforts. As a result, the GOP opted for a “wait-and-see” approach while House Democrats approved more than $3 trillion in new spending in May. Concerns about the deficit have impacted the current round of negotiations, with some White House and GOP officials pushing for the next stimulus package to only cost $1 trillion.
Discussions are expected to pick up in the coming days, as they must decide what to do with expiring emergency unemployment benefits.
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