February 14, 2008
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Citizens’ Guide Provides Easy Public Access to Government’s Financial Report

Washington - The Treasury Department and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) today released The Government's Financial Health: A Citizens' Guide to the 2007 Financial Report of the United States Government. The eight-page Citizens' Guide provides readers with a user-friendly reference tool for finding key results of the Financial Report released in December 2007. This is the first time the Federal government has issued this type of summary. A similar summary report will be published annually hereafter.

Drafted in coordination with the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), the Citizens' Guide provides an overview of the U.S. government's short-term and long-term financial outlook, including the government's biggest fiscal challenge, the unsustainable growth in entitlement programs.

In the next 35 years, the automatic spending portion of the budget will completely swallow all available revenue, which means that resources will not be available for some of the federal government's basic responsibilities, such as national defense and homeland security. The Citizens' Guide makes this kind of information easily available to a broad audience, explaining these realities in clear and stark terms.

The Citizens' Guide is available electronically at http://www.fms.treas.gov/frsummary/index.html.