The 2025 Federal Budget: Risks of Imbalance and Measures to Neutralize Them

The subject of the study is the execution of the federal budget in the first half of this year, as well as amendments to the Federal Budget law adopted in June 2025. The purpose and scientific novelty of the work is to identify the risks and causes of the imbalance of the federal budget, as well as to develop preventive measures to reduce and neutralize them. The relevance of the study was determined by the situation with the cash execution of the federal budget in the first half of 2025. and the nature of the June amendments to the budget law, which, according to the authors, testifies in favor of the continuation of the Government of the Russian Federation’s policy of budget dominance. At the same time, the dynamics of the main budget parameters began to increase in different directions: spending plans continue to increase in response to the current challenges of the Russian economy and national interests in general, and income expectations are officially revised towards more modest forecasts. It has been established that despite the growth of the budget deficit, its high resistance to various kinds of external shocks is still due to the low level of public debt and the availability of sovereign reserves. At the same time, the authors acknowledge that the risks of chronic budget imbalance are steadily increasing, which, given the continuing high geopolitical uncertainty and price volatility, requires the country’s financial leadership to adopt a more stringent spending policy that should be commensurate with the country’s revenue opportunities. As a result of the study, it was concluded that the main difficulties with «reducing» the budget should be expected not so much in 2025 as in subsequent years as the tax base continues to shrink, primarily in non-oil and gas revenues, as well as the gradual «eating away» of the liquid part of the national welfare fund and the build-up of domestic debt through the mechanism of «veiled» issue financing.

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