Washington, Aug 11 (IANS): The US federal government registered a budget deficit of about $69.6 billion in July, bringing the total budget gap for the first 10 months of this fiscal year near the $1 trillion mark, the US Treasury Department reported.

The US federal government raked in a revenue of $184.6 billion last month, and registered outlays of $254.2 billion, reported Xinhua.

The combined budget deficit in the first 10 months of the 2012 fiscal year, which ends at the end of September, stood at $973.8 billion, 11.5 percent lower than the imbalance for the same period of last fiscal year, according to the Friday report.

However, the country is still on track for a deficit of over $1 trillion for the fourth consecutive fiscal year.

The US federal government ran a record budget deficit of $1.41 trillion dollars in the 2009 fiscal year and a $1.29 trillion imbalance in the 2010 fiscal year.

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO), a non-partisan budgetary and economic research agency for the US Congress, predicted that the federal government would run a budget deficit of about $1.17 trillion in the current fiscal year, a slight reduction from the $1.3 trillion budget deficit recorded in the 2011 fiscal year.

Facing growing pressures from fiscal challenges brought about by tax hikes and automatic spending cuts scheduled to kick in early next year, Democrats and Republicans at the Congress are still at odds over how to bring the fiscal policy back to a sustainable path.