The receipt: what America actually buys
For every $100 in federal outlays, here is what Washington bought in fiscal 2025, including the lines that hide in plain sight.
· U.S. Wealth Watcher
The federal budget is usually sold as a trillion-dollar fog machine. So we turned fiscal 2025 into a receipt: exactly $100.00, line by line.
The biggest lines are not surprising. The useful part is seeing the whole bill in the same unit, because a billion dollars sounds enormous until it is standing next to Medicare, Social Security, defense, and interest on the debt.
- $18.05 Medicare: $1837B
- $16.39 Social Security: $1668B
- $13.92 Defense: $1416B
- $12.29 Interest on the debt: $1251B
- $11.26 Medicaid & health: $1145B
- $7.46 Income support: $759B
- $5.03 General government: $511B
- $4.06 Veterans: $413B
- $2.18 Education & training: $222B
- $1.94 Transportation: $198B
- $1.31 Environment & natural resources: $133B
- $1.13 Justice & law enforcement: $115B
Total: $100.00.
The immigrant-services line is $0.06 of the receipt, about $6.6B in direct services such as refugee assistance, asylum support, and citizenship accounts. Immigration enforcement is $0.42, about $43B for policing, detention, border security, and immigration courts. Corporate tax breaks are not on the spending receipt at all. JCT's corporation-side tax-expenditure estimate is about $180B a year, which is money Washington chose not to collect before the bill was printed.
That is the trick: ordinary spending gets a receipt, while tax breaks often get a footnote. We put both in view so the comparison is not left to vibes.
Explore the live receipt at https://uswealthwatcher.com/spending. For the longer history of who pays the bill, see https://uswealthwatcher.com/taxes.
We report from public records and published reporting. Appearing here is not an allegation of wrongdoing.