Este artículo estará disponible en español en El Tiempo Latino.
In recent speeches and media scrums, President Donald Trump has lauded the federal budget surplus for the month of June, claiming the surplus had not happened in “many, many years” or “decades.” To be clear, the U.S. had not recorded a surplus in June since 2016 – but the country has had several surpluses in other months since that time.
Furthermore, while Trump has attributed the surplus in June to “good management and tariffs,” the latter of which have produced record revenue, the Congressional Budget Office said there would have been a budget deficit last month if the government had not made billions of dollars in payments in May that are usually paid in June.
Also, as of June, the U.S. still had an overall budget deficit of more than $1.3 trillion through the first nine months of fiscal year 2025, according to Treasury Department data. That’s about $64 billion more than the deficit during the same period in fiscal year 2024.
Trump first mentioned the roughly $27 billion surplus in June during remarks at the White House Faith Office luncheon on July 14 – and he sounded surprised by the news.
“And on Friday, it was announced that the United States Treasury ran a budget surplus. Is that true, Scott?” Trump said, asking Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who was in attendance. “In June, for the first time in many, many decades. Wow! I didn’t know that.”
Trump told Bessent that he would add that information to his “repertoire,” and the president has since mentioned the June surplus several times, including in July 15 remarks at the Pennsylvania Energy and Innovation Summit in Pittsburgh.
“And did you notice that two days ago they just announced that they had a budget surplus of $25 billion in this country,” he told attendees, referring to the June surplus, which he lowered by about $2 billion. “They never saw anything like that. Everyone’s saying where did that — that’s been like decades.”
But it has happened before, and it wasn’t as long ago as he suggested.
In fact, prior to June, the most recent monthly surplus was in April, when government revenue exceeded its expenditures by about $258 billion, according to the Treasury. And most recently before that, there were six months with surpluses during the Biden administration (January 2022, April 2022, April 2023, August 2023, April 2024 and September 2024).
Trump may have been referring to the last time there was a surplus in June — that was June 2016, during the Obama administration, which still wasn’t “decades” ago.
Kent Smetters, a professor of business economics and public policy at the University of Pennsylvania, told us that federal budget surpluses regularly occur in April, because of Tax Day, which is the deadline for most U.S. tax filers to submit their annual income tax returns and make tax payments. He said that surpluses also tend to occur in June, which the Wall Street Journal noted “is one of Treasury’s biggest revenue months of the year … because it’s a month when companies and individuals file their quarterly estimated tax payments.”
For example, the Treasury recorded four consecutive surpluses in June from 2013 to 2016. There have also been a number of surpluses in the month of September, which is the last month of the third quarter of the calendar year.
As we said, Trump has credited this year’s June surplus to tariffs and fiscal restraint.
New tariffs that Trump put in place this year did help. Last month, the government brought in about $26.6 billion in revenue from tariffs, or customs duties – a 321% increase from the $6.3 billion collected in the same month last year. June was the second straight month in which revenue from tariffs reached well over $20 billion, and the CBO recently estimated that a number of tariffs implemented earlier this year, between Jan. 6 and May 13, could reduce total federal deficits by $2.8 trillion over 10 years.
But tariffs aside, the CBO said there was another major reason that there was a June surplus instead of a deficit: the shifting of certain federal expenditures from June to May.
In its most recent “Monthly Budget Review,” the CBO said that federal spending was lower than it would have been in June because the government made billions of dollars in payments in May that were due on June 1, a Sunday. The Treasury said that some payments for active-duty military, veterans, Supplemental Security Income and Medicare were moved to May because June 1, the normal payment date, was a non-business day.
“If not for those [timing] shifts, the government would have recorded a deficit of $71 billion in June 2025,” the CBO said, emphasizing the word deficit.
So, Trump was off on the timing of previous budget surpluses, and he overlooked a key reason for the most recent surplus in June.
Editor’s note: FactCheck.org does not accept advertising. We rely on grants and individual donations from people like you. Please consider a donation. Credit card donations may be made through our “Donate” page. If you prefer to give by check, send to: FactCheck.org, Annenberg Public Policy Center, P.O. Box 58100, Philadelphia, PA 19102.