Multi-Year Budget Workgroup

The Sweeney Center’s Multi-Year Budget Workgroup is an independent bipartisan group of former budget officials, policy experts, academics and economists convened to provide a multi-year perspective to 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 in 2010. 

The Multi-Year Budget Workgroup issued New Jersey’s Fiscal Future: Comparing Multi-Year Revenue Forecasts With Current Services Budget Projections on 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 its five-year New Jersey Economic Outlook in February. The report, written by the Workgroup’s lead economist, Charles Steindel, Ph.D., former chief economist for the NJ Treasury Department and former senior vice president at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, projected that any recession would be mild and short.