Non-defense Discretionary Spending?!?
October 15, 2010
The way elected officials talk about cutting “non-defense discretionary spending” you’d think it involved bonfires fueled with tax dollars. President Obama’s 2011 budget proposes capping “non-security” discretionary spending. The Senate recently barely voted down two different proposals that would have imposed serious cuts.
With all this attention on a specific part of the budget, it must be a big slice of the federal spending pie full of programs that nobody likes, have no purpose, and could easily be cut back, right? Wrong. Non-defense discretionary spending is just 15 percent of the federal budget and yet it funds hundreds of valuable programs and services across a wide range of important areas. Like Volunteers of America’s.
Discretionary spending is one of two major categories in the federal budget; the other is “mandatory” spending. Discretionary spending is funding that has to be reset each year by Congress. Mandatory spending, on the other hand, is funding that does not require any specific action by Congress to be spent. Mandatory spending includes programs such as Social Security, Medicare and agricultural subsidies where the amount the government spends is dictated by laws—sometimes laws passed many years ago—that set up formulas.
The discretionary spending that Congress has to approve every year when it develops the federal budget is further divided into two major categories: defense and non-defense. About 58 percent of all discretionary funding is defense related. Non-defense discretionary funding, then, is less than half of the discretionary category, which is itself only one-third of the total federal budget. In other words, non-defense discretionary funding makes up only 15 percent of this year’s federal budget.
The single largest non-defense discretionary program is the Veteran’s Health Administration, which delivers free and low-cost health care to more than 8 million veterans. The National Institutes of Health is also entirely supported by discretionary funding. So are the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Drug Enforcement Agency and the entire federal prison system. Federal aid to local school districts comes from the discretionary pot, as does the budget for the Food and Drug Administration. The National Park System operates because of discretionary funding, which puts it in the same company as the United States Coast Guard, the Transportation Safety Administration and the Farm Service Agency.
On a more local level, these funds support many of Volunteers of America’s employment training programs, some childcare programs, programs for federal prisoners, certain income security programs, non-emergency transportation, veteran’s health services that we supply and any Congressional appropriations.
