The 2025 Fiscal Challenge season is over. We’ll resume meetings in January 2026. In the meantime, join us preparing for the 2025 Fed Challenge!
What is the Fiscal Challenge?
The Fiscal Challenge is a nation-wide undergraduate economic policy competition where teams of students design and present a policy agenda which will maintain the expected federal debt-to-GDP ratio at it’s current level over the next 30-years. The NEU team typically starts preparing in January at the beginning of the spring semester. For the first round, a video presentation is due on March 11th. The top six teams from round one present at finals in Washington DC, typically in early April.
Creating the presentation is a mix of reading policy analyses, building a simple budget model for the teams agenda, creating graphs, and writing a script. The challenge is a great opportunity for anyone interested in public policy to get experience with the federal budget. Our team has presented policies that touch on large a swath of different areas, including environmental policy, tax reform, entitlement reform, public transit investment, defense investment, labor policy, and much more!
About Us
The NEU team has a strong record of success in the Fiscal Challenge: our 2022 team won the competition and we placed 3rd overall in 2023 and 2024. Our team welcomes any undergraduate, regardless of experience, year, or major! A major goal of the team is to give students experience with economic policy, even if they have no prior knowledge. Although only six team member can present, we typically have a large group of students who learn more about policy in order to contribute in future years. There are no applications required, feel free to show up to any of our meetings (even if you miss the start of the semester).
If you want to join the team and get more information when meetings start, sign up for our mailing list.