A flat discretionary base, and one enormous spike.
The Environmental Protection Agency's budget authority, FY1976– FY2031, from OMB's Historical Tables. The arc is almost the opposite of a trend: a modest, slowly-growing discretionary base punctuated by a single dramatic outlier — FY2022, when the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and Inflation Reduction Act pushed roughly $65B of one-time water-infrastructure and State Revolving Fund money through EPA, an order of magnitude above the surrounding years. That is a one-time appropriation, not a new baseline. This is agency-wide budget authority — it includes the supplementals the appropriated topline excludes.
FY2027 budget authority
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nominal · OMB estimate · agency-wide
Series peak
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Series span
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0 fiscal years
Years parsed
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contiguous, numeric — self-checked
EPA budget authority — the arc
nominal (current $) · OMB Historical Table 5.2Reading the arc
Almost everything on this line is one story: the difference between EPA's base and a single infrastructure surge. The era markers trace the structural shifts — the 1980 Superfund (CERCLA) enactment, the 2009 Recovery Act, and above all the FY2022 IIJA/IRA spike of $65B, roughly an order of magnitude over the base. That spike is a one-time appropriation for water infrastructure and the State Revolving Funds, not a change in the underlying baseline; reading it as a trend is the cardinal error in the EPA arc. A department monitor has to keep it separate from the annually appropriated discretionary base the appropriations view tracks — which the IIJA/IRA supplementals are deliberately excluded from. This series is nominal: OMB's Historical Table 5.2 publishes no constant-dollar basis, and we do not synthesize one.