How the chart works

Methodology

What counts as spending

Outlays are payments made by the federal government. Values are nominal millions of dollars and follow the federal fiscal year, which ends September 30.

Actual and provisional periods

Completed years come from OMB Historical Table 3.1. OMB columns marked “estimate” are excluded. Treasury's current fiscal-year-to-date data are incomplete and shown only when explicitly selected.

Waterfall grouping

The nine largest positive functions in each selected year receive individual bars. Remaining positive functions form “All other spending.” All negative functions form “Offsetting receipts.” Those steps reconcile to the source's reported net total.

Coverage

The comparable functional history begins in FY 1940. Function and subfunction detail from Table 3.2 begins in FY 1962. Earlier official totals exist, but no comparable functional allocation is presented, so this site does not estimate one.

Drill-down hierarchy

Table 3.2 subfunctions reconcile to their Table 3.1 parent functions. Legitimate Defense program components are retained as a third level. On-budget and off-budget rows are excluded because they are alternate accounting splits rather than additional spending categories.

Ranked view

The bump chart ranks positive Table 3.1 functions by nominal outlays within each fiscal year. Functions are drawn only while they occupy a displayed position, so gaps indicate time outside the selected top five or top ten. Equal rounded amounts are ordered alphabetically for a stable display.

Quality controls

Every refresh verifies source structure, rejects estimate columns, hashes raw payloads, and reconciles function rows to reported totals before replacing the live dataset.