A budget that keeps time with the census.
The Department of Commerce's budget authority, FY1976– FY2031, from OMB's Historical Tables. The defining shape is a decennial sawtooth: the line ramps toward each census — 1980, 1990, 2000, 2010, 2020, and now 2030 — as the Census Bureau staffs up, then collapses after. The lone outlier is FY2022, a one-time spike from the CHIPS & Science Act, not a change in trend. This is agency-wide budget authority, not the annual discretionary base.
FY2027 budget authority
—
nominal · OMB estimate · agency-wide
Series peak
—
Series span
—
0 fiscal years
Years parsed
—
contiguous, numeric — self-checked
Commerce budget authority — the arc
nominal (current $) · OMB Historical Table 5.2Reading the arc
Two rhythms explain almost every wiggle in this line. The first is the decennial census: the Census Bureau ramps for years ahead of each count and then falls off, so the agency total rises and drops on a roughly ten-year clock — structural, not a policy swing. The second is the FY2022 peak of $85B, an order of magnitude above the surrounding years: that is the CHIPS & Science Act's one-time semiconductor and research funding flowing through Commerce, not a new baseline. A department monitor has to read both correctly, and keep this agency-wide budget authority separate from the annually appropriated discretionary base the appropriations view tracks. This series is nominal: OMB's Historical Table 5.2 publishes no constant-dollar basis, and we do not synthesize one.