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-one fiscal years of outlays, same-basis, from OMB Historical Table 8.1, inflation-adjusted with CPI-U. Hover any bar for exact figures; hover the mandatory bands for the full program breakdown. FY2026 is the OMB current-services estimate, not actuals.
Read the gold line. 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 13.2% of all spending. The mandatory buckets (sand, violet, teal, taupe, slate) ride on autopilot, and the red band (net interest) hibernated at ~5% through the low-rate era and woke up at 13.5% — by FY2025 interest took 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 ~2.3× over thirty years, not the 5.0× 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.