ABSTRACT
This chapter begins by providing a broad overview of spending, placing it in a comparative and historical perspective. In the United States, the most profound change has been the growth of mandatory programs, which have come to dominate federal outlays relative to discretionary spending, that portion of the budget set through annual congressional appropriations. The chapter provides a brief overview of the two largest mandatory programs, Social Security and Medicare. It concludes with a discussion of the budget process for discretionary spending. Efforts to impose procedures to control deficits, while successful in the 1990s, were less effective thereafter. As political polarization grew, the budget process broke down and increasingly took the form of a zero-sum battle over discretionary spending.
