The three biggest federal programs are health care (including Medicare and Medicaid), pensions (including Social Security), and Defense.

[+] Drill-down: Click on the [+] to drill down to more detailed numbers. For federal spending line items (but not revenue) you can drill down three levels to view about 4,000 items of spending at the “agency code” level.

Click on ato display a bar of data in a row or column of this table.Click onto display a time-series chart of data in a row.

Change Data View: The default view of spending data is by function . But you can also view data by program or the UN COFOG classification system.

US Budget Year: By default, the table displays budgeted and estimated numbers from the most recent US Federal Budget submitted to the Congress by the president. But you can look at numbers from other US Federal Budgets using this dropdown control.

US Budget Year: By default, the table displays budgeted and estimated numbers from the most recent US Federal Budget submitted to the Congress by the president. But you can look at numbers from other US Federal Budgets using this dropdown control.

Units: By default, values are displayed in billions of nominal dollars . By using a dropdown control in the table heading you can select millions of dollars , percent of GDP , percent of federal total , percent of overall total , dollars per capita of population , and thousand dollars per capita of population .

Spending Definitions

Pensions: Pensions, disability.

Health Care: Health care.

Education: K-12, college, training.

Defense: Military, foreign policy, veterans, foreign aid.

Welfare: Cash welfare, food stamps, unemployment benefits, workers compensation, housing, excluding health care.

Protection: Police, fire, law courts, prisons.

Transportation: Road, rail, airports.

General Government: Legislative, executive, finance.

Other Spending: Research, economic development, agriculture, energy, environment.

Interest: Interest on government debt.

Total Spending: Federal: total outlays including grants to state and local. State and local: direct spending on programs.

Notes

The table shows overall budgeted federal outlays for major functions for the next five years, as estimated in the historical tables in the current presidential budget.

You can change the budget to be analyzed or drill down to view more detailed spending information.

But. For the “default” and “programs” views, we have extracted data from the Public Budget Database to expand Social Security and Medicare beyond the single line item each gets in Table 3.2. The Public Budget Database starts publishing six years of estimated outlays with the FY10 budget, so this page will only provide a full six years of estimated outlays starting with the FY10 budget.

Data Sources: Federal spending from Budget of the United States Government.

For a discussion of the sources of the government spending data used here read How We Got the Data for usgovernmentspending.com.

Budget Updates: The president’s budget is typically published each year in February.