Every federal dollar falls into one of four buckets. Only one is decided by a congressional vote each year — and it is being squeezed from both sides. Thirty fiscal years of outlays, same-basis, from OMB Historical Table 8.1, inflation-adjusted with BLS CPI-U.
Read the gold-zone split. Defense (green) and non-defense domestic (steel) together are the contested pool. In the war years it peaked near 39% of everything the government spent; since the pandemic it hovers near 24–27%. The steel band — the part aimed squarely at Americans at home — fell from 17.9% to 14.0% of all spending. Meanwhile the red band (net interest) hibernated at ~5% through the low-rate era and woke up at 13.8% — in FY2025 interest takes the same share of the budget as all non-defense discretionary programs combined.
Why 2025 dollars is the honest default: nominal bars flatter growth — a dollar in 1995 bought about twice what it buys today. Adjusted for inflation (CPI-U annual averages), the total pool grew ~2.2× over thirty years, not the 4.6× the raw numbers suggest. The mandatory band's rise is largely absorbed cost — healthcare price inflation in Medicaid, demographics in Social Security — not new generosity. The part of the budget that could flex toward new help is the part that is shrinking.