Loan guarantees made in the Federal Housing Administration’s (FHA’s) guarantee program for single-family mortgages from 1992 to 2013 are now projected to generate small costs over their lifetimes rather than the significant savings that were recorded in the federal budget at the time the guarantees were made—a deterioration that stems largely from the sharp downturn in the housing market in the late 2000s. CBO has estimated the budgetary effect of those guarantees using information through April 2014 (when the agency published the projections it has used as the baseline for analyzing legislative proposals this year).
CBO’s estimate that the guarantees made during the 1992–2013 period will cost $2.2 billion is slightly higher than the estimate of $0.1 billion in costs that can be inferred from the subsidy rates and loan volumes reported by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), but it is quite different from the $63.0 billion in budgetary savings implied by the original estimates for those guarantees recorded in the federal budget.
Under the accounting approach required by the Federal Credit Reform Act of 1990 (FCRA), new mortgage guarantees made by the FHA in 2014 and 2015 will produce budgetary savings, CBO projects. However, under a more comprehensive fair-value approach to estimating the cost of loan guarantees, FHA’s 2014 and 2015 guarantees are projected to have small costs instead of savings.