DOGE has failed; federal spending has only increased [View all]

By Justin Fox / Bloomberg Opinion

Amid the layoffs, canceled programs and other cutbacks in Washington, D.C., since Donald Trump moved back into the White House in January, one thing hasn’t changed: Federal spending has just kept going up.

Spending since Jan. 21 is up 8.7 percent over the equivalent period in 2024, 7.2 percent over 2023. Some kinds of federal spending are irregular and intermittent, and any comparison like this can be affected by the timing of payments, but the Congressional Budget Office’s latest monthly budget review made adjustments for timing shifts and estimated that spending in the 2025 fiscal year, which began in October, was up 7 percent through April over the same period a year earlier. The increase appears to be real.

What’s driving it? The Daily Treasury Statement from which these numbers are derived breaks down what it calls “withdrawals” into 102 categories, one of which — public debt cash redemptions — is excluded here because it’s not really spending. (I’ve used data from the Hamilton Project’s federal-expenditure tracking website but also downloaded numbers directly from the Treasury Department just to be sure.) I’ve consolidated the other 101 into cabinet departments plus a few agencies and programs with large spending changes relative to the equivalent period last year.

Some high-profile cutbacks show up here as sharp spending declines at the Department of Education and the U.S. Agency for International Development. Others don’t because the affected agencies are folded into larger departments, as with the $1.2 billion, 7.7 percent decline in spending at the National Institutes of Health, which falls under the Department of Health and Human Services. Also, the full impact of the cutbacks imposed by the Department of Government Efficiency, Office of Management and Budget and department heads probably isn’t showing up in the numbers yet because firing workers and shutting down programs costs money up front, plus court orders have halted many cuts, at least temporarily.

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