On July 11, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) released its annual Mid-Session Review, which contains updated estimates of the budget deficit, receipts, outlays and budget authority for fiscal years 2007 through 2012. While the administration trumpeted the decrease in the projected deficit, several aspects of the review cast doubt on the accuracy of these claims. In addition, the projections for years 2008-2012 were less noted and far more sobering. The Mid-Session Review's narrowed budget deficit projection this year follows a pattern repeated by the administration, predating its promise early in the 2004 presidential campaign to cut the budget deficit in half. Each year since then, the president's budget proposal has included an inflated deficit projection, to establish a benchmark against which revised projections were calculated to make it look like the deficit was being reduced, or reduced by more than had been expected. To see this pattern clearly established, look at OMB Watch's assessments over last few years of the Mid-Session Review:

• In 2005, we wrote that the Review "predicted an improvement in the current fiscal year 2005 (FY05) deficit by $94 billion from its February projections… Most independent analysts, however, believe the projected drop in this year's deficit is a result of tax provisions causing a one-time surge in revenue, as well as OMB's continued omission of certain costs in its deficit calculations.
• The refrain was similar in 2006: The Bush administration announced last week its revised figure for this year's budget deficit: $445 billion. This, or so the spin goes, is good news, because the original forecast was even higher -- $521 billion. But outside budget experts had warned that the forecast was inflated, which tarnishes any celebration of the new number.
• Overall, according to a 2006 Bloomberg report: "Bush's budget-forecast misses in the past six years averaged $111.5 billion, according to figures from the White House Office of Management and Budget. That ranks him behind the Reagan administration's $98.1 billion average gap, George H.W. Bush's average of $69.9 billion, and about twice the Clinton administration's $58 billion average.

What makes this Mid-Session Review even worse is the administration continues to ignore the deterioration of the country's long-term fiscal health. The OMB review fails to mention the $137 billion increase in the deficit over fiscal years 2008-2012. While this is not good news, the figure may, in fact, be optimistic, based as it is on White House assumptions that the Iraq war will cost nothing after 2008 and that the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) will neither be patched nor reformed, let alone repealed. The estimated cost for a one-year patch of the AMT is $50 billion, and more comprehensive reform may cost even more. Sadly, or perhaps fortunately — for the sake of the reliability of claims relating to the nation's fiscal condition — to say nothing of the credibility of the federal government as a source of information generally, the OMB Mid-Session Review barely garnered attention. It was released quietly by the administration almost two weeks ago, and despite the administration's best efforts to focus attention on the artificial short-term good news, it had difficultly convincing even its former advisors, such as Greg Mankiw, Bush's former chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, that the looming fiscal problems on the horizon could be considered good news. The budget projections produced over the last few years by the administration have continued to lose credibility as they have been used to further President Bush's political agenda. The release of the Mid-Session Review no longer serves as an important budgetary marker and has little or no effect on the formation on the debate over the federal budget.