Where the Federal Government's Money Goes, 1940–2025

About this chart

The picture is the federal government's outlays, stacked: time runs left to right, the height at any fiscal year is the total, and the total is cut into bands, one for each category, so the thickness of a band is that category's amount and the top edge is the whole. The bands keep one order from bottom to top, so a band can be followed as it widens or thins. The value scale grows as the picture is drawn: the early fiscal years are drawn at a readable height, and the picture zooms out as the total climbs, with the gridlines redrawn at round numbers as it goes. Each band is labelled at the leading edge with its current amount and share; on a phone held upright a table below the picture gives them. The animation draws the fiscal years in over forty-one seconds, holds on the latest for three seconds, and loops. The scrubber pauses on any fiscal year, and the speed can be changed in the controls.

Method

Each fiscal year's federal outlays are cut into six groups of budget functions and stacked, in nominal dollars: national defense; Social Security; Medicare together with the health function, which includes Medicaid; income security, veterans' benefits and services, and education, training, employment and social services; net interest; and everything else — international affairs, science and space, energy, natural resources, agriculture, commerce and housing credit, transportation, community development, justice and general government — net of the undistributed offsetting receipts, a negative entry the budget keeps outside the functions, chiefly the government's own contributions to its employees' retirement funds and rents and royalties from offshore oil and gas leases. The figures are the Office of Management and Budget's Historical Table 3.1 (outlays by superfunction and function), in millions of dollars as published; each band is the sum of its published functions, and the total drawn is the sum of the six, which differs from the table's own total by one to three million dollars in twenty-five of the eighty-six years because the functions are rounded. Every band is positive in every year, though a function inside one can be negative in a year when its receipts or loan re-estimates exceed its spending. The series runs from fiscal 1940, where the table begins, to the latest complete fiscal year; the three-month transition quarter of 1976, when the fiscal year moved to an October start, is not a fiscal year and is left out. The value scale grows as the years are drawn and never shrinks, so the years after the Second World War are drawn against the wartime scale.

Data sources

• OMB Historical Tables — Table 3.1, Outlays by Superfunction and Function: 1940–2031

Updated FY2025

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