Here is all of it
Everyone has an opinion about the federal budget and almost nobody has read one. So here is one, whole: all 606 lines the Treasury printed for fiscal 2025 — 575 spending accounts across 30 agencies and 31 sources of revenue — at Treasury’s own grain, down to a line for fifty-three dollars. Search it. Sort it. Strike anything you would not fund. Then look at what your ledger did to the debt.
The government spent $7.01 trillion and collected $5.23 trillion. The difference — $1.78 trillion — was borrowed. That is not a controversial sentence; it is the bottom line of the Monthly Treasury Statement, which is published every month and read by almost no one.
Waste is not the problem
Take the 268 spending lines that come in under a billion dollars — the ones that furnish the outrage: the odd programme, the obscure office, the fund with the strange name. Strike out every single one of them. All of it. You have saved $42.3 billion, which is 0.6 per cent of federal spending, and the deficit is still $1.73 trillion.
Now do the opposite. The twenty largest lines are 92 per cent of everything. They are retirement benefits, interest on debt already incurred, Medicaid grants to states, payments into the health trust funds, Medicare benefits, and veterans’ compensation. That is the budget. Everything else is a rounding error with a press release attached.
Where the lines are
- Department of Health and Human Services36 lines · $1.88 trillion
- Social Security Administration12 lines · $1.65 trillion
- Department of the Treasury35 lines · $1.46 trillion
- Department of Defense--Military Programs41 lines · $868.4 billion
- Department of Veterans Affairs21 lines · $376.6 billion
- Undistributed Offsetting Receipts34 lines · −$337.8 billion
- Department of Agriculture38 lines · $227.4 billion
- Office of Personnel Management11 lines · $128.2 billion
- Department of Transportation23 lines · $127.6 billion
- Department of Homeland Security17 lines · $115.3 billion
How far down this goes
606 lines is not the bottom of the federal budget. It is the bottom of the Monthly Treasury Statement, which is the government’s own summary of its own books: agency, then bureau, then account. Beneath it sit roughly two and a half thousand appropriation accounts in the Budget Appendix, tens of thousands of program activities in the apportionment files, and tens of millions of individual awards.
So this room now opens one level further. Press paid to on any spending line and it fetches the award record — every contract, grant, loan and direct payment obligated against that Treasury account in the year, named recipient by named recipient. Where a line ties to a single federal account with the names and the amounts both agreeing, you get that account’s recipients. Where it does not, the panel says so and shows the agency’s largest award accounts rather than guessing at a match.
Two cautions, because they matter. Awards are obligations — commitments to pay — not the cash that left the Treasury, so an account’s award total will not equal its line here. And most of the budget is not awarded at all: retirement benefits, Medicare payments, and interest go out without a contract behind them, which is precisely why the contractor lists everyone argues about are drawn from the small end of the ledger.
What the plate does and does not do
Every change you make is treated as permanent and as a constant share of GDP, then carried into the same forward engine Room III uses, so the interest saved on the borrowing you avoided is solved rather than claimed. Doing nothing leaves the debt at 176 per cent of GDP in 2056; that dashed line never moves, because it is not yours to move.
It is an accounting answer, not a forecast. Striking out a line does not model what happens to the economy, to the states, or to the people on the other end of the payment. A budget is not a spreadsheet with the bad rows deleted. But you cannot argue honestly about a document you have never seen, and until now you had not seen this one.
Source: U.S. Department of the Treasury, Bureau of the Fiscal Service — Monthly Treasury Statement, Table 5 (outlays by agency, bureau and account) and Table 4 (receipts by source), final September record. Record date 2025-09-30; retrieved 2026-08-25. fiscaldata.treasury.gov. Line totals sum to within $451 million of the printed outlay total and exactly to the printed receipt total. GDP anchor and the forward path are CBO’s, as set out in Room III.