# User Fees and Offsetting Collections Money the government **collects in exchange for services or from business-type activities** — passport fees, park entries, Medicare premiums, FDIC assessments, spectrum auctions, oil-lease royalties — and which, by budget convention, is **subtracted from outlays rather than added to revenue**. This accounting quirk is why several [[Budget Functions]] lines can go **negative**. ## Why function lines go negative When offsetting collections in a category exceed its gross spending, the *net* outlay is negative. That's how: - **Commerce & Housing Credit** went to −$28.6B in FY2025 (FDIC collections from liquidating failed banks). - **Energy** runs slightly negative in some years (petroleum-reserve sales, enrichment receipts). - **Undistributed Offsetting Receipts** (function 950) is a large negative line (~−$150B) holding rents, royalties, and the employer share of federal pensions. ## The RWKB angle Offsetting collections quietly shrink the *reported* size of government: spending financed by fees never shows up as either a tax or full gross outlay, so the same activity looks smaller on a net basis than a gross one. It's a benign convention that becomes a rhetorical tool — "government spending" figures can be made to look smaller or larger depending on gross-vs-net presentation, a cousin of the [[Outlays vs Budget Authority]] and [[On-Budget vs Off-Budget]] framing games. Mostly it's just the reason the [[Budget Functions]] table has minus signs. ## Related - [[Budget Functions]] · [[Outlays vs Budget Authority]] · [[On-Budget vs Off-Budget]] - [[Federal Budget FY2025]] · [[Budget Hub]]