The cost of the federal retirement system, drawn out over fifty years.
OPM's budget authority, FY1976–FY2031, from OMB's Historical Tables. This is agency-wide budget authority — overwhelmingly the mandatory retirement and insurance trust funds OPM administers: annuities from the Civil Service Retirement & Disability Fund, health benefits through FEHB, life insurance through FEGLI. It is notOPM's discretionary operating budget, which is a rounding error beside it. The line rises with the retiree population, annuity growth, and health-cost growth, bending at the structural markers below.
FY2027 budget authority
—
nominal · OMB estimate · agency-wide, mostly trust funds
Series peak
—
Series span
—
0 fiscal years
Years parsed
—
contiguous, numeric — self-checked
OPM budget authority — the arc
nominal (current $) · OMB Historical Table 5.2Reading the arc
This is not a discretionary program line and cannot be read like one. Because the trust funds dominate, the arc is essentially the running cost of the federal retirement and benefit system: it climbs with the annuitant population and with health-benefit cost growth, and bends at statutory events rather than policy choices — the FERS phase-in after 1986, the Postal retiree-health pre-funding era, the COVID-19 period, and the recent health-cost and annuity growth run that carries it to a $159B peak in FY2030. A monitor has to keep this agency-wide budget authority strictly separate from OPM's tiny discretionary operating budget 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.