How PA Budget Watch works

What "structural deficit" means

Pennsylvania's General Fund — the state's main operating budget — is on track to spend roughly $50 billion this fiscal year while collecting about $45 billion in revenue. The gap between the two is the operating deficit; the portion that's permanent and recurring rather than papered over with one-time funds is what economists call the structural deficit. The PA Independent Fiscal Office (IFO) currently puts that figure at $3.9 billion for FY 2025-26, projected to grow to $6.7 billion next year and $8.4 billion by FY 2029-30 if nothing changes.

Where each number comes from

Live deficit ticker

Calculated from IFO's $3.9B annual structural deficit projection, ticked up second by second based on fraction of the fiscal year elapsed (PA's fiscal year runs July 1 – June 30). The number you see is "deficit accrued so far this fiscal year." Source: PA IFO.

Revenue and spending breakdowns

FY 2025-26 General Fund totals (~$45B revenue, ~$50B spending) approximated from the PA IFO Monthly Revenue Update categories and the FY 2025-26 Enacted Budget published by the Office of the Budget. Per-category percentages are stable year over year; the dollar splits shown are good approximations and will be replaced with live monthly actuals in Phase 2.

Federal funding context + cliff scenarios

Compiled from USAspending.gov (federal awards to PA), KFF Medicaid State Indicators (FMAP rates), and the Office of the Budget federal funds reporting. The cliff scenarios (FMAP cut, ACA expansion repeal, SNAP cost-shift) are modeled estimates based on current program sizes; actual cuts would depend on specific federal legislation.

Personal impact calculator

Anchored on IFO's own "$1,500 per family of 4" figure for closing the FY 2025-26 deficit. We scale per capita by household size, then for the time-horizon view we sum projected annual shares using IFO's growth curve ($3.9B → $6.7B → $8.4B), extrapolated linearly beyond FY 2029-30.

Rainy Day Fund countdown

Counts down to the IFO-projected end of the Rainy Day Fund's depletion window (FY 2026-27). Based on the current ~$7B balance and the projected drawdown rate.

Latest from PA IFO

Scraped automatically from ifo.state.pa.us by a GitHub Actions cron job that runs every Monday at 06:00 UTC. The five most recent publications are pulled and committed to the repo as a JSON file. New publications appear here within ~7 days of being released. Last refreshed: April 27, 2026.

What's auto-updated vs. seed data

The IFO publications card is the only fully-live data source on this dashboard right now. Every other number was compiled from official PA sources and committed manually to the repository as JSON. Phase 2 of this project (planned) will add automated fetchers for monthly revenue, department-level spending, and federal funding flows.

Limitations and caveats

• — Per-category dollar splits are approximate; absolute totals reconcile with IFO and Office of the Budget figures, but per-line splits will refine as live fetchers come online.
• — "Cliff scenarios" are modeled estimates, not predictions. Their purpose is to show order-of-magnitude impact, not to forecast specific federal cuts.
• — The personal impact calculator uses a per-capita scaling assumption that's editorial — not all households would actually pay the same share if the deficit were closed via taxes (PA's flat income tax means scaling is roughly linear, but exemptions and credits vary).
• — Brand colors are pulled from the WTP-PA Squarespace site palette; the dashboard logo file is currently a PNG converted from the source WebP.

Want to verify or contribute?

The full source code is open at github.com/wtp-pa/dashboards. Every data file is committed to git, so you can see exactly when each number changed and where it came from. Issues, corrections, and suggestions welcome via GitHub.