US federal award spending by agency, 2008 to 2025

Federal agencies committed $5.3 trillion through awards in fiscal 2025. The Department of Health and Human Services accounted for $2.02 trillion of it and the Social Security Administration for $1.63 trillion: 69 cents of every award dollar, between two agencies. The Department of Defense follows at $502 billion (9.4 percent), and no other agency reaches 6 percent.

How it is measured

USAspending.gov is the federal government's spending disclosure site, maintained by the Treasury Department. This page counts award obligations by awarding agency: contracts, grants, direct payments and loans, recorded against the fiscal year in which the money was committed (October through September). Obligations are commitments, not checks cashed, so a year's figure can include money paid out over several later years, and cancellations can push a small agency's total below zero. The data is not the whole federal budget: interest on the debt, military and civilian pay, and most agency operating costs are not awards. Agency reporting expanded under the DATA Act beginning in fiscal 2017, so earlier years are less complete.

What the shares show

Benefit programs dominate. Health and Human Services obligates $2.0 trillion, mostly Medicare, Medicaid and health grants, and the Social Security Administration pays $1.6 trillion in benefits; together they have held between 64 and 69 percent of award dollars every year since 2008. Defense, the government's largest contract buyer, is third at 9.4 percent. The top ten agencies cover 96 percent of the fiscal 2025 total, leaving about a hundred agencies to share the rest. The mix bends only in a crisis: Small Business Administration awards jumped from under $1 billion to $580 billion in fiscal 2020 as pandemic loans went out, and Treasury awards peaked at $450 billion in 2021 with relief payments, before both returned to their usual scale.