Downsizing Government has a new tool allowing readers to chart
spending for more than 500 federal agencies with the click of a mouse. It’s
pretty cool. Hopefully it will help citizens, reporters, and policymakers
understand how the budget has grown to a colossal $3.5 trillion a year.
The data is sourced from the most recent federal budget and
converted to 2013 constant dollars. In other words, the effect of inflation has
been removed so that today’s spending can be fairly compared to spending in
past years.
You can learn a lot about the government by exploring with
the charting tool. Here are some things that I noticed:
Department of Agriculture. Spending was
fairly flat for 25 years, but then soared after 2008 because of food stamp
costs (Food and Nutrition Services). Regarding agriculture, subsidies from the
Farm Service Agency are down, but subsidies from the Risk Management Agency are
way up.