2026 Government 10-K
The 10-K report includes details about US governments' financial position, risk factors, and key metrics data.
At long last: The 2026 Government 10-K
USAFacts launched the Government 10-K in 2017 to chronicle government financials with the same level of transparency we, as a nation, require of publicly traded corporations. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) requires public companies to file a Form 10-K annually to detail financial activity, including risk. The government, however, has no such obligation. We decided to do it ourselves on their behalf, to give the taxpayers the same insight into their government — at the federal, state, and local levels — that investors would have for a public company.
This year, delayed IRS data — which we rely on for updates on the government’s revenue and details on taxpayers — meant we were unable to publish our 10-K by Tax Day for the first time. In its place, we “filed” a Form 12b-25, which the SEC requires of companies that miss the deadline. Two weeks later, we’re sharing the full report, which focuses on fiscal years 2014–2023.
10 years of the 10-K
Ten reports in and the more things change in America, the more they stay the same.
By fiscal year 2014, the subject of our first Government 10-K, broad changes in healthcare had begun to take shape after the passage of the Affordable Care Act, and debates on taxes and immigration framed the upcoming midterm season. Foreign allies were fighting wars against Russian aggression and in Gaza. Top risk factors in our first report included rising national debt, climate change, social unrest, and depleting Social Security trust funds. Sound familiar?
The ensuing decade indeed brought change. The White House changed political hands twice, from Obama to Trump and from Trump to Biden. The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted American life, as the virus became the third-leading cause of death in 2020 and 2021 and left lasting social and economic impacts. Inflation hit 9.1% in June 2022, a 40-year high. Technological shifts further digitized the political discourse, opening the door for an age of institutional distrust.
And still, some of the country’s most pertinent issues in 2014 are ever present, if not ringing louder than ever. This year’s report tells the story of a nation faced with challenges that aren’t necessarily solved in a year or a decade, but sometimes in generations.
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A portrait of a nation in numbers
What is a country without its people? So much about the state of the US is reflected in the makeup of the population itself. While birth rates have continued a decades-long downward trend, population growth has increasingly been sustained by immigration, a trend that continued in FY 2023 and 2024. But shifting immigration trends coupled with policy and enforcement changes led to net immigration dropping by 55% in FY 2025. In turn, year-over-year population growth slowed to just over half a percent, one of the lowest points since the turn of the 20th century (barring two pandemics).
That population has continued to age, and the federal budget continues to strain to support it. In FY 2023, nearly one out of every six Americans was 65 or older (up from one in eight in 2000). The Social Security trust funds, which rely on a balance of workers paying into the payroll tax and the retired and disabled beneficiaries, paid out more than they brought in by the largest margin ever, and were projected to be depleted as soon as 2032. Total personal healthcare expenditures were up 73% from 2013 to 2023, with out-of-pocket expenses up 57%. The median age hit 39, up half a year from 2020 and nine years from 1980.
In some ways, 2023 was a reminder of our nation’s resiliency as it began to recover from the pandemic and historic inflation. The COVID-19 national emergency ended on May 11, 2023, and inflation receded from 7.7% at the start of the fiscal year to 3.7% by the end. Wages and salaries grew by 6%. Federal expenditures eased to their lowest point since before the pandemic after adjusting for inflation, dropping by $446 billion (although a $694 billion decrease in revenue after a peak in 2022 meant a higher deficit).
But it was also a reminder of the myriad unpredictable risks to which federal budgeting is exposed. Spending on natural disaster relief increased by 211% due in part to a 56% increase in billion-dollar weather and climate disasters (a metric made harder to track when the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s disaster database was retired last May). The FDIC paid $103 billion to resolve three of the largest bank failures in US history. And after continued aggression on the Russian border, the US committed $16.6 billion in foreign aid to Ukraine in 2023, with more obligations to Ukraine and Israel in the coming years. At the end of the fiscal year, the national debt was $33.1 trillion, up 7.1% year over year.
This report comes as we prepare for another midterm season in which the public is still debating immigration, taxes, and healthcare. The debt is still rising, and foreign military operations still weigh on the budget. Without timely and comprehensive data reporting from the government, we can’t do our work to bring that data to you, the American people. That’s why the pursuit for better government data infrastructure is and always has been a critical part of our work. When faced with challenges that scale across generations and throughout a nation of 342 million people, our greatest shared resource is information.
