In one year the United States government spent more than the entire economic output of every country on Earth except two. Here is that money — where it came from, where it went, and the gap that's left — drawn entirely from the U.S. Treasury's own books.
Spending and revenue are for fiscal year 2025 (Oct 2024–Sep 2025), the most recent complete year. The national debt is live — the real figure as of today, still climbing as you read.
Every dollar of the gap between revenue and spending is borrowed — and added to the national debt that ticks upward above.
For every $1.00 Washington collected, it spent $0 — and put the difference on the nation's tab.
Most federal spending isn't discretionary at all — it's Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, veterans' care, and the interest on past borrowing. Hover any line to see what it funds.
That top $1.9T bar is mostly two checks: Medicare (coverage for 65+ and the disabled) and Medicaid (the federal share of state health coverage). Everything else the department does — NIH, CDC, the FDA — fits in what's left.
Since FY2015 total spending nearly doubled. Categories that grew faster than that gained a bigger slice of the pie; those that grew slower shrank as a share — even though almost every line rose in raw dollars. The standout: interest on the debt tripled.
Income tax and the payroll taxes withheld from paychecks supply the overwhelming majority of federal revenue. Corporate taxes and tariffs together raise less than payroll taxes alone.
For most of the past decade, customs duties were a rounding error — about 1% of federal revenue. In FY2025 they more than doubled, to $195 billion, as sweeping new tariffs took effect. Tariffs are taxes on imports, ultimately paid through the prices Americans pay.
Beyond benefits and interest, Washington buys things — and a handful of corporations are awarded an outsized share. These are the companies awarded the most federal contract money in FY2025, grouped by parent company. Color marks the sector — and nearly every name is either weapons or (often military) health care. Hover any line to see what they sell.
Washington sends money to the states two very different ways. Contracts are what it buys — and they pool around the national-security economy. Grants are what it returns to the states — Medicaid, highways, food aid, schools, housing — and they track where people are. Switch the lens to see the two maps diverge.
The biggest flow of all — direct payments to people (Social Security, Medicare, SNAP, ~$3 trillion) — isn't shown here. Federal data books almost all of it as aggregated “multiple recipients” recorded at payment processors and insurer headquarters, not where the recipients live, so a by-state map of it would be flatly misleading.
Years of borrowing, met by higher interest rates, have pushed the net interest on the debt past the entire military budget — and it grows automatically, before Congress decides a single thing. (Figures are net interest paid to the public; the government also pays ~$0.25T more to its own trust funds.)
Of the $39T debt, about $31.6T is held by the public; foreign governments and investors hold roughly $9.3T of that. Japan is the largest single creditor — and China, once #1, has nearly halved its holdings since 2013.
Spending surged in 2020 and never returned to earth, while revenue grew far more slowly. The shaded area is borrowed money — a deficit in every single year.
Dollars alone don't show the weight of the debt — its size relative to the economy does. Gross federal debt is about 123% of GDP, and the slice held by the public is near 99% — both close to their post-World-War-II highs.
This page shows the what. The why — who fought for each dollar and who profits from it — lives in other public records. Here are nine threads worth pulling, and exactly where to start digging.
Every dollar was authorized by a vote. Pull the roll calls on the FY2025 appropriations bills, the NDAA, and the debt-ceiling deal — then see which members funded the agencies their districts live on while voting "no" for the cameras.
Mortgage breaks, the employer health exclusion, capital-gains rates — "tax expenditures" are spending by another name, and they never appear in the $7T. Together (over $2 trillion a year) they cost more than Social Security. Who benefits most?
The biggest contractors spend tens of millions lobbying. Cross their awards against their lobbying filings and the donations flowing to the Armed Services and Appropriations members who set their budgets.
Every dollar of debt is someone's asset. How much does the Federal Reserve own? Which foreign governments? And what happens to next year's interest bill as old low-rate bonds mature and reset?
"Community Project Funding" brought earmarks back — thousands of member-requested line items, each with a named sponsor and recipient. Map them against the sponsors' donors and home districts.
The government admits to hundreds of billions a year in "improper payments." Which programs leak the most, how much is fraud versus error, and how little ever gets clawed back?
How much of the contract money skips competition entirely? Filter awards for sole-source and "limited competition," by agency and by company, and watch the patterns emerge.
Optum and Humana now collect tens of billions running Medicare Advantage and military health. Is the government paying private middlemen more than it would cost to deliver the care directly?
Crop subsidies are sold as a lifeline for the family farm — yet a large share flows to the biggest operations and absentee landowners. Follow the payments to the names behind them.
Classified spending is appropriated like everything else, so it's already inside this $7T — mostly within Defense; only the program detail is secret. The intelligence top-line is even published: ~$101B in FY2025 ($73.3B civilian + $27.8B military). Funding anything outside appropriations is illegal — that's what made Iran-Contra a scandal. The deeper gap: the Pentagon just failed its 8th straight audit, unable to account for $4.65T in assets.