I’ve taken advantage of this to break Healthcare into Medicare and Medicaid – each is a huge item – and to break non-defense discretionary spending into domestic and international components – many people are surprised to learn that international discretionary spending, which includes all foreign aid, comprises such a tiny share of the federal budget. Points (1) and (2) above enable the graph to tolerate several more data points without rendering it completely unreadable. To drive home the key point – namely, that less than one-third of the federal budget can be controlled by congressional appropriations – I’ve added artwork to further discriminate between the discretionary spending and the rest of the federal outlays, as well as dark broken lines to demarcate the three main spending categories.Ĥ. You must be careful about how you order the spreadsheet data that creates your graphs.ģ. The Wikipedia chart fails to do that – in particular, the “Other Mandatory” data point is separated from the other two mandatory elements (Healthcare and Social Security). The mandatory, as well as the discretionary, data points must be visually grouped together for the reader to get a sense of the TOTAL spending in each of the three main categories. My chart makes these policy distinctions clear with distinctive colors: greenish for mandatory expenses, bluish for discretionary, and reddish for interest.Ģ.

The federal budget is frequently broken out into three main spending categories: (a) mandatory, which Congress can only change by passing new laws, (b) discretionary, which Congress controls through the annual appropriations process, and (c) interest on the national debt, which Uncle Sam must pay. Please note the following characteristics of this infographic, all of which are closely tied to the most important messages this content should be delivering:ġ.

Government budget pie chart