Multi-Year Budget Workgroup

The Sweeney Center’s Multi-Year Budget Workgroup released its sixth fiscal report, New Jersey's Multi-Year Structural Deficit: Current Services Budget Projections, Economic Uncertainty, and the Looming Fiscal Cliff, on February 19.

The report noted that New Jersey has run structural deficits totaling $7 billion for the past three budget years and projected that the state would continue to face multi-million-dollar gaps between expected revenues and the cost of providing current services, maintaining state aid levels and funding promised programs from FY26 to FY29.

The Multi-Year Budget Workgroup is an independent bipartisan group of former budget officials, policy experts, academics and economists to provide a multi-year perspective on fiscal policy issues and develop pragmatic consensus solutions to New Jersey’s most pressing issues. 

Launched in March 2022, the Multi-Year Budget Workgroup was the first blue-ribbon panel to develop multi-year revenue and expenditure projections since the Facing Our Future panel convened by the Council of New Jersey Grantmakers from 2011 to 2013. Richard Keevey and Ray Caprio, who prepared the economic forecasts for the Facing Our Future reports, both serve on the current workgroup, and Dr. Charles Steindel, who prepared economic forecasts for the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the New Jersey Treasury Department, serves as the group's chief economist.

The Multi-Year Budget Workgroup issued New Jersey’s Fiscal Future: Comparing Multi-Year Revenue Forecasts With Current Services Budget Projections  in June 2022, providing five-year revenue and expenditure projections that showed the need for the state government to carry a large surplus. 

The Multi-Year Budget Workgroup released a five-year New Jersey Economic Outlook in February 2023, followed up by NJ's Fiscal Future II: Comparing Five-Year Revenue Forecasts with Current Services Budget Projections in June 2023 in the midst of that year's budget debate. 

The Multi-Year Budget Workgroup's February 2024 study, NJ's Fiscal Cliff: Current Services Budget Projections, Long-Term Economic Forecast, and the Five-Year Revenue Gap   was followed in June 2024 by New Jersey's Fiscal Cliff: Current Services Budget Projections, Long-Term Economic Forecast, and the Multi-Year Structural Deficit .