Deep Dive | Federal Spending

Deep Dive: Mandatory and discretionary spending split departments into two different kinds of budgets

Veterans Affairs carried $238,680,000,000 in mandatory spending against $129,040,000,000 in discretionary spending in fiscal 2025 enacted appropriations, while Defense is almost entirely discretionary and Health and Human Services is overwhelmingly mandatory through Medicare and Medicaid.

The Daily Ledger Staff
October 19, 2026 · 3 min read

Key takeaways

The Department of Veterans Affairs totaled $367,730,000,000 in fiscal 2025 enacted appropriations, split into $238,680,000,000 mandatory and $129,040,000,000 discretionary.
Under the fiscal 2025 budget request, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services accounted for 1.6 trillion dollars in total budget authority at Health and Human Services, most of it mandatory, while total department discretionary authority requested was $130,700,000,000.
In the latest contract week, October 9 to 15, 2026, NASA obligated $255,126,741.57 across 218 transactions, the top department total in a week when Defense data was largely missing from the API.

Two budgets living inside one government

Mandatory spending is set by authorizing law. Benefit formulas decide the total, and the money flows without a new vote each year. Discretionary spending is set each year through appropriations. That one distinction explains why departments that look similar in size behave so differently when budgets are debated. The line most department profiles skip is the split itself, stated in dollars for the same year.

Veterans Affairs is roughly two thirds mandatory: $238,680,000,000 mandatory against $129,040,000,000 discretionary in fiscal 2025 enacted appropriations, per the Ledger research library. The Veterans Benefits Administration alone accounted for $236,900,000,000, mostly mandatory compensation and benefits, while the Veterans Health Administration accounted for $113,670,000,000 running the health system. Health and Human Services runs the other way in scale: its Medicare and Medicaid flows through the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services dwarf its discretionary research and grant programs, including the National Institutes of Health at $46,400,000,000 under the fiscal 2025 request figures, which are request figures, not enacted figures.

Why the contract week looks different from the annual picture

Contracts are mostly discretionary buying, so a contract week never shows the mandatory flows. From October 9 to 15, 2026, NASA obligated $255,126,741.57 across 218 transactions, Veterans Affairs obligated $188,474,564.40 across 1,292 transactions, and the Treasury obligated $94,048,343.73 across 54 transactions, per USAspending records. Defense returned only $4,001,011.34 across 3 transactions in the same window, a reporting gap the Ledger research file flags directly, not a real spending level.

Read together, the two pictures complete each other: the annual split shows where the money is committed by law, and the weekly contracts show what agencies are actively buying. Tomorrow the deep dive rotation continues with the next department profile. Followers get the split, with its vintage label attached, every day.

Data vintage: Veterans Affairs figures are fiscal 2025 enacted appropriations from the Ledger research library. Health and Human Services figures are fiscal 2025 budget request figures, labeled as request figures in the source. Contract figures are USAspending transactions with action dates from October 9 to 15, 2026.

Sources

1. USAspending.gov search for contract transactions, October 9 to 15, 2026: https://www.usaspending.gov/search

2. U.S. Department of the Treasury, Fiscal Data, Debt to the Penny dataset: https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/datasets/debt-to-the-penny/debt-to-the-penny

Source: U.S. Department of the Treasury, Daily Treasury Statement, September 28, 2026; Debt to the Penny.

Sources and methodology

Methodology. Daily cash figures are from the U.S. Treasury’s Daily Treasury Statement (DTS) for September 28, 2026, the government’s official daily cash-flow report. The DTS records money actually moving in and out of Treasury accounts; it is not the same as the budget deficit, which is measured monthly on an accrual-adjusted basis.

U.S. Department of the Treasury, Daily Treasury Statement – operating cash balance, September 28, 2026 (fiscaldata.treasury.gov)
U.S. Department of the Treasury, Debt to the Penny – September 28, 2026 (fiscaldata.treasury.gov)

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