Starters Jonathan Milner Starters Jonathan Milner

What portion of federal spending does the government have no budgetary control over?

Critical Analysis

Find answers to the following questions using the visual above, any links below, your big brain, and your knowledge of American government and politics:

  1. Discretionary spending is federal spending that must be appropriated by Congress every year. In 2022, it represented a little over a quarter of all federal spending and included everything from building roads to paying salaries of federal workers. In contrast, mandatory spending—spending on programs like Social Security, Medicare for the elderly and disabled, and Medicaid for the poor—is not approved by Congress each year. Instead, the government must provide program benefits to anyone who qualifies for them. Congress created these programs and can change them, but it doesn’t approve spending for them; they are on autopilot.Based on the data from the chart above, in 2022 about what portion of total federal spending was discretionary*, and about what portion of total federal spending was mandatory*?

  2. Based on the data from the chart above, identify one trend in federal spending between 1962 and 2019.

  3. Every year the Congress and the POTUS set a federal budget. In which area of the chart above does all that budgetary spending belong: Net Interest, Mandatory, or Discretionary?

  4. Federal spending totaled $6.3 trillion in 2022. About 62 percent of the total was for mandatory programs not subject to regular budget review, while nearly 30 percent covered discretionary programs for which Congress must regularly appropriate funds. Eight percent went for interest on government debt. If you could create the ideal balance between discretionary, mandatory, and interest spending what would it be?

  5. Based on the wild and crazy trends in the chart above, what do you think the balance between US federal government mandatory, discretionary and interest spending will be in 20 years?

  6. Elon Musk and DOGE is trying to cut $1trillion from the budget. Those cuts cannot come from net interest paid on the debt or, in the short term, from mandatory spending. Where will these budget cuts come from?

  7. Before COVID-19 the budget deficit for 2020 was predicted to be over 1 trillion dollars. Now, with emergency spending, the budget deficit is predicted to exceed $3.8 trillion (or 3.8 thousand billion, or $3,800,000,000,000) Over time, how will that huge deficit impact the spending trends from this chart?

  8. As discretionary spending gets squeezed more and more every year what are some specific programs and items that must be cut from the budget?

  9. According to the graphs below*, what is the biggest single portion of mandatory spending, and what is the biggest single portion of discretionary spending?*

  10. Former Treasury official Peter Fisher once said, the federal government is basically “a gigantic insurance company,” albeit one with “a sideline business in national defense and homeland security.” The insurance spending he wrote about is in the mandatory spending section of the chart above. Based on the data from the chart, does Fisher's assessment seem correct?

Write and Discuss

Take ten minutes to write about the question at the top of the page and then discuss with your classmates.

Act on your Learning

Contact POTUS TRUMP or tweet him and share your opinion of US federal spending and what he should do about it!

Get Creative

Redraw the visual above extending the graph to 2040.

Learning Extension*

 
 

Read this swell new Pew Report putting federal spending in perspective.

*Hi, how are you? Did you know that the authority for discretionary spending stems from annual appropriation acts, which are under the control of the House and Senate Appropriations Committees. Most defense, education, and transportation programs, for example, are funded that way, as are a variety of other federal programs and activities. Those appropriations are subject to a set of budget enforcement rules and processes that differ from those that apply to mandatory spending. As the Congress considers appropriation acts, CBO tallies the budget authority those acts would provide and estimates the outlays that would result.

While I’ve got you here, did you know that mandatory—or direct—spending includes spending for entitlement programs and certain other payments to people, businesses, and state and local governments. Mandatory spending is generally governed by statutory criteria; it is not normally set by annual appropriation acts. Outlays for the nation’s three largest entitlement programs (Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid) and for many smaller programs (unemployment compensation, retirement programs for federal employees, student loans, and deposit insurance, for example) are mandatory spending. Social Security and some other mandatory spending programs are in effect indefinitely, but some (for example, some agriculture programs) expire at the end of a given period. Roughly 60 percent of federal spending in 2012 (other than for the government’s net interest costs) was mandatory. Legislation that changed direct spending would, by itself, affect the budget deficit because no further legislative action would be required for the change in spending to occur.

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