Over at the whitehouse site, they have an excel sheet that also summarizes a large portion of the Mandatory spending programs. Unfortunately, they group programs together differently so it’s hard to tell what to add or remove, or what was grouped together differently.
Fortunately their totals are about equal to the totals that the CBO lists in it’s Spending Outlook document I linked to yesterday. CBO = 2094 billion, Whitehouse = 2092 billion. I believe the 1 billion in difference has to do with rounding.
I tried to figure out how the WhiteHouse and CBO groupings were different. In the end it was impossible to determine. For instance, the CBO lists “Higher Education” on a single line, but the whitehouse document combines it with at least 3 other programs that may or may not be in the CBO’s “other” category. (If you think you can do better, here’s a link to the google doc where I tried to piece them together)
The whitehouse document does list some of the programs that were in the CBO’s “other” category. In fact, the whitehouse document’s “other” category only listed 4 billion in spending. Not great, but better than 33 billion. So here are the programs that the whitehouse specified that the CBO grouped into other categories.
- Community and Regional development
- General Government
- Energy
- International affairs
- National defense
Not exactly what I was looking for. They’re just a more precise grouping and not an actual list of government programs. My quest goes on…
loading...
