Trace one public decision from law to debt.

Interactive investigation

Choose the record you want the five steps to explain.

Constitution, Article I, sections 7–9

Annual flows and the debt that remained.

Receipts and outlays are yearly flows. Debt is the accumulated obligation at the end of the fiscal year. They use separate graphs because putting them on one scale would hide the annual flows. The selected year moves on both graphs.

━━ Receipts┄┄ Outlays

━━ Gross federal debt

What this can show: when receipts, outlays, deficits, and debt changed, and which documented events belong beside those years. What it cannot show by itself: the share of the debt caused by one program. That requires the law, account, outlay, repayment, and financing record.

OMB FY2027 Table 1.1: actual receipts and outlays through FY2025 · OMB FY2027 Table 7.1: federal debt at year end

Event records matching the controls

Who supplied the receipts?

The selection below updates the shares immediately. Individual income plus social-insurance and retirement receipts is a Treasury-category comparison, not a complete study of who ultimately bears each tax.

OMB FY2027 Table 2.1: receipts by source · CBO: tax-incidence method

Put the trust-fund balances beside the general budget.

A federal trust fund is not a segregated vault of cash. Dedicated receipts enter Treasury. Amounts not needed for current benefits or program costs are invested in special Treasury securities. The security is an asset of the trust fund and a binding obligation of Treasury. When the fund redeems it, Treasury must supply spendable cash from current receipts, additional public borrowing, or other budget adjustments.

How large are the obligations?

The table shows the principal funds used in this explanation. It does not imply that every federal trust fund has the same financing rules.

OMB FY2027 Table 13.1: Social Security and Medicare trust-fund cash · SSA: Social Security trust-fund accounts and investments · 2026 Social Security Trustees Report · U.S. DOT FY2025 financial report: dedicated-collection funds · FAA: Airport and Airway Trust Fund FY2025 status · GAO: TARP lifetime cost, January 2024

Turn the finding into a request.

Choose one act, account, and period. Ask for the authority, money authorized, money paid, recoveries, remaining obligation, and public result. Put the response beside the question.

PREPARE THE OVERSIGHT REQUEST KEEP THE RESULT

Source and coverage record

Official OMB FY2027 Historical Tables checked September 9, 2026. Completed annual actuals run through FY2025; FY2026 is still in progress and is not mixed with full-year actuals. This edition contains 46 fiscal-total and debt observations, 66 receipt-composition observations, 46 combined OASI/DI cash observations, and 6 event records.

Download the data and source register

Was annual funding ready?

All regular appropriations bills were enacted on or before October 1 in four of these 49 fiscal years. Continuing resolutions were enacted in 46 years, totaling 207 acts.

A CR count is not a shutdown count. FY1977 had all regular bills in place by October 1, yet two CRs funded omitted activities. The number of regular bills changed from 13 to 11 to 12; compare the denominator as well as the count.

This record runs through FY2025. It does not extend the spending actuals above beyond FY2022, measure disruption costs, or assign responsibility for delay.

Citizen check: identify the program, its funding law and expiry, and the service affected. Ask the responsible office for the documented consequence of a delay.

CRS R46595, March 27, 2025, Table 1 · Source record

How long did interim funding last?

FY1998–2025: 134 interim CRs; average duration 118.18 days. Duration includes covered funding-gap intervals and can extend beyond regular-law enactment. It does not mean every program stayed under a CR throughout. Full-year CR remainders are excluded.

Calendar checks differ from published durations by one day in FY2013, 2015, 2017, 2018 and 2021. Both values are shown; the four later-year differences remain unresolved.

FY2013: Table 2 gives March 26, while Appendix A and Public Law 112-175, section 106 give March 27 as the outer date. Earlier enactment can end funding sooner. The 178-day figure matches March 27.

Finance: trace risk into public obligation

Ask who could take the risk, who was responsible for checking it, and who carried the loss when the institution could not. The savings-and-loan crisis and the 2008 crisis are separate episodes; compare their mechanisms without collapsing their costs.

What would prove a public obligation was met?

For one intervention, identify the legal authority, recipient, instrument, conditions, oversight office and reporting date. Record money committed, money paid, recoveries and remaining exposure separately. Then ask whether the promised protection reached depositors, borrowers, workers or communities—and which evidence measures that result.

A repaid loan can coexist with severe household harm. A large authorization can coexist with a smaller net program cost. Neither observation answers the entire citizen question.

Read the case record · Prepare the evidence request · Inspect household outcomes

Retirement: who carries the risk, and what reaches the worker?

A growing retirement market does not, by itself, establish a secure retirement. Ask what was promised, who supplied the money, who carried the investment risk, and what income the worker can actually draw.

Follow your own benefit

1. Keep the plan description, benefit statement, contribution history, fee disclosures and any notice changing the plan. Record the dates and plan type.
2. Separate your contributions from employer contributions. Identify the vested amount, investment change, fees and withdrawals; an increase funded by your own wages is not the same as an employer-funded gain.
3. For a promised pension, record the benefit formula, service credit, retirement age and payment options. For an account, distinguish the current balance from any estimated monthly income and retain the estimate’s assumptions.
4. Ask the plan administrator to explain an unexplained difference in writing. Preserve the response and the plan’s claims or review instructions. Use the action workbench to track the question and next step.

Request: “Please reconcile the benefit described in my plan documents with my current statement. Identify employee and employer contributions, vesting, fees, investment changes and any change to the benefit formula, with the effective dates and supporting records.”

This record supports a question about retirement security. It does not turn an account balance into guaranteed income or establish that one policy caused every shortfall.

Source reconciliation and open claims · Keep your evidence and request · Where the benefit stopped

How did major benefit-program outlays change?

Select a program, then use the fiscal-year and administration controls above. The chart compares its outlays with total federal spending. All points use the same 0–100% scale.

These are OMB’s program classifications. The total includes programs not shown separately and accounting offsets; do not add the four selected programs and call the result all mandatory spending. Net interest is shown separately above.

Outlays record spending in a year. They do not measure future benefit promises, the number of people served, adequacy of benefits or each household’s income. Nominal dollar changes also reflect prices; shares of total spending answer a different question.

OMB Table 8.5, FY2024 edition · Download the source record. FY1980–2022 actuals in millions of dollars; later estimates excluded. Program lines are preserved as published. Offsetting receipts appear elsewhere in the source, so these lines are not each program’s fully net fiscal cost.

How much of spending went to interest?

Use the fiscal-year and administration controls above to compare the same period. This view uses net budget interest. Gross Treasury interest is shown separately so the two measures are not confused.

Net interest reflects Treasury interest and the budget’s interest and investment-income offsets. Interest received by federal trust funds is part of that reconciliation. It remains a claim in the trust-fund accounts even though the unified budget treats it as an offset here.

A share of spending is not a share of national debt. The chart does not assign interest to one president, one tax law, or one crisis. Rates, the amount and timing of borrowing, and the composition of debt all matter; their separate effects are not estimated here.

Official OMB Table 3.2 · Data, offsets and source record

Same FY2024 source vintage as the main fiscal line: FY1980–2022 actuals, millions of nominal dollars. Later estimates are excluded. This is not a current-year interest ranking.

Ask for a defined spending and interest record

Compare the industries: what did the public receive?

Use the same questions across industries, then keep the answers within the evidence. A tax preference, emergency loan, settlement and negotiated price are different public actions. They cannot be added into a single cost without reconciling their meaning and dates.

8 sectors shown; all have bounded source comparisons; full histories remain unfinished.

These comparisons do not rank industries or prove one universal cause. Financial services and retirement have additional sections on this page. Every row links its primary sources and the action record.

Aviation: who keeps the freedom, and who carries the obligation?

Thom’s March 2026 WP-031 draft states:

The central finding is not that deregulation caused these crises but that industries cannot claim free-market freedoms while retaining public rescue eligibility.

Test that public-obligation argument against the actual sequence. Keep beneficial outcomes, adverse outcomes and alternative explanations in the record.

What a citizen can ask

For a proposed rescue, identify the recipient, instrument, amount and public purpose. Ask which conditions protect workers, service access and the public’s financial interest; who checks compliance; and which report shows the result. For your route or airport, compare fares, fees, frequency and reliability over the same period.

The evidence supports scrutiny of the exchange between public support and public obligation. It does not establish that deregulation caused a pandemic, that every merger raised every fare, or that citizens received no benefit from payroll assistance.

Source reconciliation: WP-031’s $59 billion figure cannot serve as a verified total for all historical airline rescues. CBO’s figure here refers specifically to pandemic payroll assistance. The original draft is preserved.

Inspect the case and source reconciliation · Test household benefit · Prepare the citizen record

What does the cycle evidence establish?

A sequence of loosened rules, crisis, and rescue is a pattern to test. It does not replace the account-level causal record. Compare who received authority or cash, who repaid it, what loss remained, and which public protection changed afterward.