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Tea Party Fact Sheet

A usgovernmentspending.com brief by Christopher Chantrill

Government Spending since 1900

Chart S.03t: Total Spending as Percent GDP

Would you believe it? Back in 1902 the government spent only six percent of our national income for public use. That was for everything: defense, education, the Post Office. Today in 2016 the government takes almost 36 percent of our nation’s product. And for what?

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Government Debt since 1900

Chart D.13t: Total National Debt as Percent GDP

Used to be that the National Debt only went up to pay for wars. Then President Reagan increased the debt to win the Cold War. Now President Obama is increasing the debt to bail out the banks — and anyone else that needs a cool trillion or so.
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Decline of the Dollar

The federal government took control of the nation’s money supply in 1913. President Roosevelt cut the value of the dollar to get out of the Great Depression. President Nixon cut it again to get re-elected in 1972. Now the dollar is worth about 3 cents of the dollar in 1913. You decide how well the feds have done.

Welfare Spending. Destroying the low-income family

Chart S.33t: Welfare Spending Since 1965

The great achievement of government welfare programs is that now 40 percent of children are born out of wedlock and over 30 percent of children of high-school dropouts aren’t living with both parents.
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Education Spending. Dumbing us down

Chart 2.52: TEducation Spending by Government Level

Back in 1842 Horace Mann promised that public schools would cut the crime rate by 90 percent. That was when nearly all Americans were able to read. Today the government reckons that only 13 percent of adult Americans are “proficient” in literacy and numeracy. But government spending on education has never been higher.
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There’s More...

usgovernmentspending.com. Where you go to get facts about government.

Prepared by Christopher Chantrill.
email: chrischantrill@gmail.com

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Federal Deficit, Receipts, Outlays Actuals for FY 2025

On October 16, 2025, the US Treasury reported in its Monthly Treasury Statement (and xlsx) for September that the federal deficit for FY 2025 ending September 30, 2025, was $1,775 billion. Here are the numbers, including total receipts, total outlays, and deficit compared with the numbers projected in the FY 2025 federal budget published in February 2024:

Federal Finances FY 2025 Outcomes
	Budget billions	Outcome billions
Receipts	$5,485	$5,235
Outlays	$7,226	$7,010
Deficit	$1,781	$1,775

We use the spending projections from the FY 2025 budget because the Federal government did not publish spending projections in its Budget for Fiscal Year 2026 as originally published in May 2025.

The Monthly Treasury Statement includes "Table 4: Receipts of the United States Government, September 2025 and Other Periods." This table of receipts by source is used for usgovernmentspending.com to post details of federal receipt actuals for FY 2025. usdgovernmentspending.com obtains the data for outlays and receipts from apis at fiscaldata.treasury.gov.

This MTS report on FY 2025 actuals is a problem for usgovernmentspending.com because this site uses Historical Table 3.2--Outlays by Function and Subfunction from the Budget of the United States as its basic source for federal subfunction outlays. But the Monthly Treasury Statement only includes "Table 9. Summary of Receipts by Source, and Outlays by Function of the U.S. Government, September 2025 and Other Periods". Subfunction amounts don't get reported until the FY27 budget in February 2026. Until then usgovernmentspending.com estimates actual outlays by "subfunction" for FY 2025 by factoring subfunction budgeted amounts for FY25 by the ratio between relevant actual and budgeted "function" amounts where actual outlays by subfunction cannot be gleaned from the Monthly Treasury Statement.

Final detailed FY 2025 actuals will not appear on usgovernmentspending.com until the FY 2027 federal budget is published in February 2026 with the actual outlays for FY 2025 in Historical Table 3.2--Outlays by Function and Subfunction.