Shortly after 1:00 PM on Friday, March 23, 2018, President Trump signed the U.S. Congress’ omnibus discretionary spending bill, which authorizes the various departments and agencies that make up the U.S. government to spend $1.309 trillion through the end of its current 2018 fiscal year on September 30, 2018. The chart below shows where most of that money is going, as appropriated under each of the individual 12 spending bills that were collected into the omnibus spending bill, as compared to how much each category was allowed to spend in the 2017 fiscal year.

Every spending category recorded an increase that was faster than the 1.8% core rate of inflation from 2017 to 2018.

This chart only shows the discretionary spending portion of the U.S. government’s total spending, which is the part of the U.S. government’s budget that isn’t on autopilot. In addition to this $1.3 trillion, the U.S. Congress has previously mandated the U.S. government to spend an additional:

• $987 billion for Social Security
• $982 billion for Medicare ($582 billion) and Medicaid ($400 billion)
• $624 billion for welfare programs
• $310 billion for net interest on the U.S. government’s total public debt outstanding, which has already climbed over $21 trillion and which will climb even further, and a little faster now, thanks to the spending bill that President Trump signed last Friday.

Altogether, the U.S. government will spend somewhere around $4.2 trillion during its 2018 fiscal year.

After signing the FY 2018 Omnibus spending bill, President Trump vowed that he would “never sign another bill like this again”. Alas, this kind of thing is business as usual in Washington D.C., where President Trump has yet to clarify how he intends to live up to that new vow.