Most of the funding for the activities of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) comes from discretionary appropriations provided each year in the annual appropriations acts enacted by Congress. HUD's programs are primarily designed to address housing problems faced by households with very low incomes or other special housing needs. These include several programs of rental assistance for persons who are poor, elderly, and/or have disabilities. Three rental assistance programs—Public Housing, Section 8 Vouchers, and Section 8 project-based rental assistance—account for the majority of the department's non-emergency funding (about three-quarters of total funding in FY2010). Two flexible block grant programs—HOME and Community Development Block Grants (CDBG)—help communities finance a variety of housing and community development activities designed to serve low-income families. Other, more specialized grant programs help communities meet the needs of homeless persons, including those with AIDS. HUD's Federal Housing Administration (FHA) insures mortgages made by lenders to home buyers with low downpayments and to developers of multifamily rental buildings containing relatively affordable units. FHA collects fees from insured borrowers, which are used to sustain the insurance fund and offset its administrative costs. Surplus FHA funds have been used to offset the cost of the HUD budget. In recent years the HUD budget has also received significant amounts of emergency supplemental funding. Almost $20 billion was provided through HUD's budget for recovery assistance to communities affected by Hurricane Katrina and the other hurricanes of 2005. The economic stimulus legislation enacted in 2009 ( P.L. 111-5 ) provided over $13 billion to HUD's programs. Table 1 presents total enacted appropriations for HUD over the past five years, including emergency appropriations. HUD's budget authority (not including emergency supplemental funding, discussed later) has increased by about 40% since 2002. As demonstrated by the line in Figure 1 , the rate of growth had increased in recent years. In FY2004 and FY2005, year-over-year growth was relatively flat (under 2%), but, beginning in FY2006, HUD's budget had year-over-year increases of 5% or more each year, with growth of nearly 10% in FY2009 and nearly 12% in FY2010. The FY2011 appropriations act reversed the recent trend of increasing budget authority by decreasing HUD's budget authority by nearly 11% compared to FY2010. Adjusting for inflation, the growth in "real" funding (shown by the gray bars in Figure 1 ) has been less robust. Over the 10-year period, adjusting for inflation, HUD's budget grew by about 15%. Through FY2008, the year-over-year growth never exceeded about 3.5%, and in two years there were declines. Most of the growth over the previous 10 years came in two years: FY2009 and FY2010, although about half of that growth was eliminated with the reductions in FY2011. As shown in Figure 2 , HUD's funding is made up of several components. The components of HUD's annual funding, or budget authority, include regular annual appropriations, emergency appropriations, rescissions, and offsets. HUD's programs and activities are funded almost entirely through regular annual appropriations , also referred to as discretionary appropriations. The amount provided in the annual appropriations acts each year generally determines how much funding will be obligated and eventually spent for each of HUD's programs and activities. In some years, Congress will also provide emergency appropriations , usually in response to disasters, through one or more of HUD's programs. These funds are generally provided outside of the regular appropriations acts—often in emergency supplemental spending bills—and are generally provided in addition to regular annual appropriations. Congressional appropriators are generally subject to limits on the amount of new non-emergency discretionary funding they can provide in a year. One way to stay within these limits is to provide less in regular annual appropriations. Another way is to find offsets. A portion of the cost of HUD's regular annual appropriations acts is generally offset in two ways. The first is through rescissions , or cancellations of unobligated or recaptured balances from previous years' funding. The second is through offsetting receipts and collections , generally derived from fees paid by HUD partners or clients. The interaction between new appropriations and offsets provided through rescissions, receipts, and collections determines HUD's total net budget authority. Net budget authority is also the "cost" of the HUD budget, as estimated by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) in its scorekeeping process. The total amount of net budget authority provided to HUD each year, while important for federal budgeting purposes, is not necessarily the best measure of the amount of funding that is being provided for HUD's programs and activities. Because of the role of offsets, declining or increasing net budget authority does not necessarily mean declining or increasing regular appropriations. As shown by the line in Figure 2 , which repeats the data shown by the line in Figure 1 , net non-emergency budget authority for HUD increased 40% between FY2002 and FY2011, from over $29 billion to over $41 billion. However, the overall increase in net new non-emergency budget authority masks several important trends. As noted earlier, between FY2002 and FY2010, HUD's net non-emergency budget authority increased by 57%. During that period, regular annual appropriations, which is the amount provided by Congress to fund HUD's programs and activities, grew by only 37% (shown by the dark green bars in Figure 2 ). During the same period, the amount available in offsetting receipts and collections and the amount rescinded, which Congress uses to reduce the cost of providing new appropriations, declined by more than 70% and 96%, respectively (shown by the dark and light red bars in Figure 2 ). In summary, from FY2002-FY2010, appropriations were increasing, but the amount of offsets and rescissions available to offset the cost of those appropriations was decreasing. That trend was reversed in FY2011, when Congress cut the amount of appropriations relative to FY2010 and, at the same time, the amount of available offsets increased. In terms of net budget authority, HUD's funding was cut by 11% in FY2011 compared to FY2010. However, regular appropriations in FY2011 were only cut by about 4%. The difference between the cut in net budget authority and appropriations is attributable to a 43% increase in offsets (discussed later in this section). The growth in regular appropriations during this period (shown by the dark green bars in Figure 2 ) is largely attributable to growth in HUD's Section 8 tenant-based voucher and project-based rental assistance programs, which combined are the largest component of the HUD budget. As can be seen in Figure 3 , from FY2002 to FY2011 appropriations for the combined Section 8 programs grew by 77%, while combined funding for all other HUD programs and activities declined by about 6%. During this period, the Section 8 programs went from accounting for about 46% of HUD's regular appropriations to accounting for over 60% of HUD's regular appropriations. As can be seen in the chart, for a number of years Section 8 funding grew while combined funding for all other HUD programs declined. In FY2008, FY2009, and FY2010, combined funding for other HUD programs began to grow, but it declined sharply in FY2011. As noted earlier, there are two Section 8 programs: tenant-based rental assistance (vouchers) and project-based rental assistance. They were funded in the same account for many years, but since FY2005 they have been funded separately. As is shown in Figure 3 , appropriations for the Section 8 programs combined have grown by nearly 80% from FY2002 to FY2011. However, it is important to note that the rates of growth have not been the same across the two Section 8 programs. As shown in Figure 4 , appropriations for the Section 8 project-based rental assistance (PBRA) program grew by 75% from FY2005 to FY2011; appropriations for the Section 8 tenant-based rental assistance (TBRA) program, or Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher program, grew only about one-third as much during that period, by about 24%. The growth in appropriations for PBRA is largely attributable to the renewal of old project-based Section 8 contracts when they expire. Those contracts were originally funded in the 1970s and 1980s with long-term appropriations. The contracts typically require new annual appropriations in order to be renewed. The vast majority of contracts are now funded with annual appropriations, but some expirations continue to occur and require new appropriations each year. As discussed earlier and shown in Figure 2 , between FY2002 and FY2010 the amount of offsetting receipts declined by about 70%. That decline was largely attributable to declines in offsetting receipts available from the FHA mortgage insurance programs. The amount available from FHA to offset the cost of new HUD appropriations had declined from a high of over $3.5 billion in FY2004 to well under $0.5 billion in FY2010. That trend completely reversed in FY2011 when the amount of offsetting receipts from FHA increased to over $4 billion, the highest level in a decade. The increase is attributable to FHA's increasing market share following the downturn in the economy, as well as to policy changes made by FHA that increased the fees charged to new FHA-insured borrowers. When no FY2011 appropriations legislation was enacted before the beginning of the fiscal year (October 1, 2010), the 111 th Congress enacted a series of continuing resolutions (CRs) that continued funding at the FY2010 level for most accounts in the federal budget (including all of the accounts in HUD's budget). The final CR of the 111 th Congress, P.L.