Federal spending
Direct payments
Money paid straight to individuals under a benefit program — the single largest thing the federal government does.
- Who gets it
- People: retirees, beneficiaries, farmers, anyone who qualifies for the program.
- For example
- Social Security checks, Medicare reimbursements, crop-support payments.
Grants
Assistance. Money sent to a recipient to carry out a public purpose — no procured deliverable in return.
- Who gets it
- States, cities, universities, hospitals, nonprofits, research labs.
- For example
- A research grant to a university, or highway funds passed to a state DOT.
Contracts
Procurement. The government buys a specific good or service, competed and priced, and gets a deliverable back.
- Who gets it
- Companies — from defense primes to IT vendors to construction firms.
- For example
- A $400M contract to build a stretch of Navy ship, or a study delivered to an agency.
Insurance
Protection the government underwrites against a defined risk, paid out when a covered loss occurs.
- Who gets it
- Policyholders in federal programs — homeowners, farmers, depositors.
- For example
- Federal flood insurance, crop insurance, deposit insurance backstops.
Loans
Credit the government extends — or guarantees — that's expected to be repaid. Only the subsidy cost is counted as committed.
- Who gets it
- Students, small businesses, homeowners, exporters.
- For example
- Federal student loans, SBA-backed small-business loans, mortgage guarantees.
Other
Everything that doesn't fit the buckets above — miscellaneous commitments the source records without a clean type.
- Who gets it
- Varies — a catch-all for unclassified or mixed commitments.
- For example
- Intra-governmental transfers and commitments the source leaves uncategorized.
By agency
The agencies committing the most.
By dollars committed, — each rule split by how the agency moves its money.
Who got paid · programs
The biggest benefit programs.
That direct-payments slice, opened up: Social Security and Medicare — the checks the government sends straight to people. Each one dwarfs any single contractor. The single biggest thing the federal government does.
By industry
The biggest industries by dollars committed.
The other side of the thesis — the the government actually buys. Grouped by NAICS, the federal catalog of what an award is for. (Contracts only; grants and direct payments aren’t industry-coded.)
Who got paid · recipients
The biggest named recipients.
The organizations that actually cash the checks — state Medicaid agencies and the big defense primes trade the top spots from year to year. Health care and procurement are the throughlines of federal spending.
Federal contracts only
Contract set-asides.
A set-aside reserves a contract before a single bid comes in, steering it to small, veteran-, women-, or minority-owned firms. But it’s the exception: of contract dollars are steered — the rest is full and open, where anyone can compete. Grants and direct payments carry no set-asides at all.
Set-aside codes come straight from the FPDS procurement records. The full-and-open bucket is contracts competed without any reservation; everything else is a carve-out that limits who’s eligible to bid.
Recently awarded
The biggest awards of the last 90 days.
The newest large commitments, by dollar amount — fresh off USAspending.gov.
The bigger picture
Committed, and paid out.
Money committed each year, the cash that followed it out the door, and — above both — the whole of government. Defined below.
Reading the numbers
How to read these numbers
- Committed
Money the government legally promised by signing awards, counted in the year each action happened. The headline on every page here.
- Loans count at their cost
A loan is expected to be repaid, so its full amount isn't spending — budget law counts what the loan is expected to cost the government over its life. That figure can be negative: in a good year, federal credit programs turn a profit, and the Loans line shows it with a minus sign. The gross amount lent or guaranteed is a different, much larger number, and it never mixes into these totals.
- Paid on awards
The cash that has actually left the Treasury against those awards. Treasury reports it completely from FY2022 on — earlier years are omitted rather than drawn as a misleading near-zero — and it runs a touch low even now (some awards aren't yet linked to their accounts). The gap from committed is the disbursement pipeline: promises made, not yet cashed. Nearly all of it comes from contracts and multi-year grants — direct payments like Social Security and Medicare go out almost as soon as they're committed.
- Total federal spending
Every dollar the government paid out in a year, award or not — the whole of government, including interest on the debt and payroll. Committed isn't a slice of it; the honest comparison is total spending minus what was paid on awards.
- The colored bars
Every bar on this page splits by how the money moves:
Direct paymentsGrantsContractsInsuranceLoans
Source