Where any discussion of domestic policy issues must begin and end is with what we actually spend money on, because soooo many people have either un-informed or just plain wrong understandings of what the federal government spends money on and why.
Did you know that for years about 70% of what the US government spends money on is mandatory spending that Congress and the President don’t even have to touch or deal with on a yearly basis unless they choose to modify it somehow?
In 2022 for example, according to the Congressional Budget Office, 73% of our annual budget of $6.3 trillion was taken up with mandatory spending items of Social Security ($1.2 trillion), Medicare ($747 billion), Medicaid ($592 billion), Income Security Programs ($581 billion), Student Loan Programs ($482 billion), “Other” ($520 billion), and interest payments on the national debt ($475 billion and rising….it is the fastest growing federal expense).
Could you imagine if you were sent to do a full time job each year and 73% of what you had responsibility to make sure got taken care of was already pre-locked in? Is it any wonder that members of Congress can spend so much time debating and arguing over either the remaining 27% of the budget or social issues?
As for the remaining 27% of the budget, so many Americans believe that we give a ton of foreign aid to other countries and need to be spending that money at home. Per the Office of Management and Budget here is the breakdown of our discretionary annual spending as a nation in 2022 per the President’s budget request for that year (actual totals passed by Congress were slightly different):
| Defense | $715 Billion |
| Health & Human Services | $134 Billion |
| Veterans Affairs | $113 Billion |
| Education | $103 Billion |
| State | $64 Billion |
| Housing & Urban Development | $58 Billion |
| Homeland Security | $52 Billion |
| Energy | $46 Billion |
| Justice | $35 Billion |
| Agriculture | $28 Billion |
| Other/Miscellaneous | $26 Billion |
| Transportation | $26 Billion |
| NASA | $25 Billion |
| Interior | $17 Billion |
| Treasury | $15 Billion |
| Labor | $14 Billion |
| Commerce | $12 Billion |
| Environmental Protection Agency | $11 Billion |
| Social Security Administration | $10 Billion |
| National Science Foundation | $10 Billion |
| Corps of Engineers | $7 Billion |
| General Services Administration | $1.5 Billion |
| Small Business Administration | $900 Million |
| Totals | $1.5 Trillion |
You are free to draw your own conclusions, but here are my key observations and things I take issue with our spending priorities/lack of fiscal discipline:
- Because our national debt continues to rise due to years of budget deficits, we are spending $475 billion a year and rising on just interest on the national debt. That money gets us literally nothing in return. That $475 billion, while mandatory to pay so that we don’t default on our debt, is larger than every discretionary line item in the budget other than Defense. Imagine how much good that $475 billion could do for all of the other agencies fighting for the leftovers that Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and Defense leave behind?
- To put it another way, we spend more on interest payments in one year than most of our government agencies spend in over 10 years!
- The State Dept itself is only 4% of the discretionary budget, and barely 1% of the total US budget, and even if foreign aid was 100% of what it spent its money on (which it isn’t), foreign aid is a pinprick in the grand scheme of things. The very definition of a political red herring.
Now that the preliminary groundwork is laid out, in the drop down menu for domestic policy let’s look at the path ahead for each individual line item, in the order that we currently spend the most money on.
Perry Waag 