Study V · Plate XVII · The Federal Dollars Series
The Federal Ledger
Every dollar that entered or left a federal account in seven columns, traceable from a tax to a recipient.
Every dollar that entered a federal account and every dollar that left one, laid out left to right: where it came from, which part of the budget it went through, what kind of payment it became, which account paid it, who received it, and — in the last two columns — who that was, in ever finer detail. Click any bar or ribbon for the definition, the amount, where it comes from and where it goes, and the source it was taken from.
The columns are drawn to one scale, so a ribbon's thickness is the money in it. Money that passes through more than one account is counted each time it moves, which is why the ledger totals $9,811.5 billion while the Treasury's net figure for the year is $7,010.0 billion; the "Other federal accounts" and "Financial transfers" rows are where that double counting lives, and they are hatched so you can see it.
Money in, money out, to whom
Seven columns, one scale. Hover to trace a dollar's path; click to read about it. Widths are in billions of dollars, fiscal year 2025 (1 October 2024 – 30 September 2025).
Click any bar or ribbon and a panel opens with its definition, amount, where it comes from and goes, and its source. The chart scrolls sideways on narrower screens; nothing is cropped. Hatched bars are money moving between federal accounts (counted twice by construction). Keyboard: Tab to a bar, Enter to open it.
What each state gets
Federal dollars per resident, by state, for the six large benefit programs and for the whole federal footprint. Pick a measure; click a state. Every measure is the latest year its agency has published, so the years differ and are named on each button.
Per-resident figures divide each program's state total by the Census Bureau's July 1 population for the matching year (Vintage 2025). Social Security is calendar 2024 annual benefits by beneficiary address; Medicare is Original (fee-for-service) Parts A and B payments in 2024 only, so it understates states where Medicare Advantage is common; Medicaid is the federal share of FY2024 spending (the state share is excluded); Veterans is all VA expenditure in FY2024 by the veteran's address; SNAP is May 2025 benefits multiplied by twelve; SSI is December 2024 payments multiplied by twelve. "Federal spending", "federal receipts" and "balance" are the Rockefeller Institute's FFY2023 balance-of-payments series, which allocates all federal spending and all federal receipts to states. IRS collections are FY2025 gross collections by the address on the return, which credits corporate and withheld taxes to headquarters states, not to where the burden falls.
Trace a dollar end to end
Pick an end recipient to see whose money it was — every source of funds, and the function, kind of payment and account it passed through, with amounts. Pick a source of funds to see where all of it went. The same tracing is in the detail panel for every bar.
Method. Every one of the 57,474 File B rows carries its budget function, object class, Treasury Account Symbol and program activity, and the ledger assigns each row a recipient class (E), a detail group (F) and a sub-group (G); the page embeds that row-level classification as a cube of 531 distinct combinations of columns B–G. A trace is therefore an exact tabulation: the sub-group's rows summed by function, by kind, by account, and so on — counts, not a proportional estimate — scaled to the printed bar total where negative rows make the two differ (never by more than $3B). Only the step to column A is an allocation, because receipts are not tied to rows: the ledger's A–B stage routes the dedicated taxes exactly (payroll taxes to Social Security and Medicare under 42 U.S.C. §401 and §1395i, highway and airport excises to Transportation under 26 U.S.C. §9503 and §9502, unemployment and railroad taxes to Income Security) and fills each remaining function with the general sources — individual and corporate income tax, customs, other excise, estate and gift, miscellaneous receipts, offsetting collections, borrowing, intragovernmental receipts — in a fixed order. A sub-group's source shares are carried through that allocation, refined one step further inside each function: the OASI, DI and HI payroll taxes, the highway excise and the unemployment taxes are routed first to the accounts the law dedicates them to (028-8006, 028-8007, 075-8005, 069-8083, 016-8042) up to those accounts' outlays, and every source's remainder fills the function's other rows in proportion. Beyond the dedicated taxes, "this dollar of Pell Grants was a corporate-tax dollar" therefore describes the ledger's convention, not law: general receipts are fungible in the general fund, and any other order would give a different but equally valid attribution. The function, kind, account and recipient shares are convention-free. Three sub-group splits (Social Security by beneficiary type, interest by holder of the debt, refunds by tax) are themselves allocations from outside series and inherit their parent group's rows.
Does it add up?
Each column of the ledger, and each set of ribbons between columns, is summed here by the page itself from the same data that draws the chart. Differences of a billion or two are rounding of the underlying rows, which are carried to a tenth of a billion.
How the ledger was built
A · Where the money comes from
Receipts are the Treasury's Monthly Treasury Statement for September 2025, Table 4, taken gross (before refunds) so that refunds can appear as money going out. Offsetting collections and intragovernmental receipts are from OMB's Analytical Perspectives; borrowing is the year's deficit; the reimbursable and revolving row is the money File B records twice because it moves between accounts.
B · Which part of the budget
OMB's budget functions (Social Security, Medicare, National defense…), matched to each federal account in the File B download by the account's function code. Dedicated taxes are routed to their own function exactly; general revenue fills the rest in order.
C · What kind of payment
Object classes from OMB Circular A-11 section 83: benefits to people (class 42), grants and subsidies (41), interest (43), personnel (11–13), contracts, services and supplies (21–26), acquisition of assets (31–33), refunds (44), financial transfers (94). Rows File B leaves unclassified are shown as such.
D · Which account paid it
Federal accounts (Treasury Account Symbols) from USAspending's File B for FY2025 through period 12, all agencies, 57,474 rows. The 44 accounts that each paid $28 billion or more are named; the rest are grouped as "other accounts" under their kind of payment. A bar's color is the kind of payment that dominates the account.
E · Who receives it
A recipient class assigned by rule: benefit payments go to households, grants to state, local and tribal governments and nonprofits, interest to holders of Treasury debt, personnel to federal employees and retirees, contracts and asset purchases to businesses, refunds to taxpayers, and transfers to other federal accounts, with named exceptions where an account plainly pays a different class (the ACA premium credit is a grant that goes to households; Medicare Advantage payments go to plans).
F · In more detail
Fifty groups that split each recipient class by program, drawn from the account and function each dollar came through: Social Security retirees, Medicare patients, Pell and student-loan recipients, defense contractors, the Government Account Series held by the trust funds, and so on.
G · Broken down further
Each of the fifty groups split once more on the most logical axis its data allows — 255 rows. Where File B carries program-activity detail inside the account, that is used (Medicaid vendor payments versus state administration; enlisted versus officer pay; Part B versus Part D). Where a group pools many accounts, it is split by paying account or agency (NIH grants versus CHIP; Border Patrol versus prisons). Where File B has no detail at all, an outside primary series supplies the shares: SSA's December 2024 benefit counts by type for Social Security; Treasury's ownership table for who holds the public debt; Treasury's Federal Investments Program statements for which trust funds earned the interest; the Monthly Treasury Statement for refunds by tax. The panel names the axis used for every row, and rows that are allocations rather than tabulations say so.
What we could not verify
File B is an agency-reported dataset and is not audited to the Monthly Treasury Statement; its gross outlays ($9,811.5 billion) exceed OMB's "everything that left an account" figure ($9,188.6 billion) by $622.9 billion, which we attribute to reimbursable and revolving-fund double counting but have not reconciled row by row. The unclassified row ($92 billion) is money whose object class agencies left blank.
The recipient column is an assignment by rule, not a payment-level record: a contract dollar is credited to "businesses" whether the contractor is a corporation, a university or a nonprofit. Within the state section, Medicare Advantage and Part D are absent from the Medicare measure because CMS does not publish them by state in a fetchable table; SNAP's annual figure is one month multiplied by twelve; the Rockefeller series is two fiscal years older than the rest and allocates corporate and other taxes by economic-incidence assumptions that can be disputed.
The ACA premium credit split between benefit and grant object classes, the Military Retirement Fund accrual flows, and the "other benefits" residual are as File B reports them and could not be checked against the agencies' own financial statements in the time available.
In the seventh column, three splits are allocations rather than tabulations: Social Security benefits by type of beneficiary use December 2024 shares applied to the fiscal-year total; interest to holders of the public debt is divided by each class's share of holdings, not by the interest each class was actually paid (bills and bonds carry different rates); and the corporate, employment and excise refund line is split in the proportions of the Monthly Treasury Statement. Two rows expose coding in the source rather than a real recipient: about $47 billion of "Defense civilian" pay is accrual payments into the military retirement and retiree-health funds, and $13 billion of "health agencies' staff" is the military retiree health fund's own outlays, both booked to personnel object classes by their agencies. They are labelled as such rather than moved, so the columns still tie to File B.
Sources
Every figure on this page traces to one of these. The S-numbers are the ones the detail panel cites.
Read next
- Federal Dollars by State, Over Time What each state received from Washington from 2014 to 2025, and where the Medicare money is booked.
- Every Federal Job Every federal civilian job shed from January 2025 to September 2026, and, through May 2026, by agency, kind and place.