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Which government reports break down federal spending per capita on welfare and corporate subsidies (e.g., OMB, CBO) for 2020–2024?
Executive summary
If you want official breakdowns of federal spending by category (including welfare programs and various forms of federal support) and the underlying data for FY2020–FY2024, two primary government producers are the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB)/Treasury through budget and financial reports: CBO publishes downloadable budget and program-level data and projections (including program baseline tables and specialty reports) [1] [2], while OMB/Treasury produce the Financial Report and budget documents that feed OMB’s totals [3]. For subsidy-like items such as federal credit programs, CBO issues dedicated estimates (e.g., FCRA credit-program costing) that complement OMB’s estimates and are designed to be comparable [4].
1. What the CBO provides — program-level outlays, baselines, and projections
The Congressional Budget Office maintains a data hub with the underlying tables that accompany its Budget and Economic Outlook, plus separate pages with baseline projections for many selected programs; these sources let you extract annual outlays, mandatory/discretionary splits, and line-item projections for the FY2020–FY2024 window [1] [2]. CBO also issues focused reports — for example, on health-insurance subsidies and the long-term budget outlook — that contain program totals used to identify how much federal spending went to Medicaid, Medicare, ACA marketplace subsidies, and other welfare-related programs in particular years [5] [6].
2. What OMB / Treasury publish — the official accounts and the Financial Report
OMB produces the President’s Budget and monthly/yearly accounting data that Treasury compiles into the Financial Report of the United States Government; the FY2024 Financial Report explicitly presents federal financial position and discusses outlays through FY2024 and is produced in coordination with OMB [3]. Those OMB/Treasury documents are the authoritative executive-branch presentation of the federal government’s receipts, outlays, and program totals and are the source for OMB-style categorizations (e.g., function or program classifications) commonly used to compute per-capita figures when combined with population data [3].
3. Where to find “welfare” and subsidy detail and per-capita calculations
“Welfare” is broken out in CBO and OMB presentations through program-level totals (Medicaid, TANF, SNAP, unemployment, ACA subsidies, etc.), and CBO’s health-insurance subsidies report gives dollar totals for 2024 (e.g., $125 billion for marketplace subsidies referenced in other reporting) that help isolate welfare-like spending [5] [7]. For corporate subsidies and credit programs, CBO’s report “Estimates of the Cost of Federal Credit Programs” follows the Federal Credit Reform Act methodology that OMB also uses for many programs and provides year-by-year estimated subsidy costs and other measures for FY2024–FY2025 that you can trace back to 2020–2024 [4].
4. How OMB and CBO differ — assumptions and presentation matter
OMB and CBO use different assumptions: CBO adheres to “current law” baselines while OMB often reflects “current policy” choices, producing different totals and projections; commentators have long noted these methodological differences and their practical consequences for projected deficits and program costs [8]. That means a simple side-by-side per-capita table should note which source’s totals you used and whether figures are actual outlays, baseline projections, or OMB-styled subsidy accounting.
5. Practical steps — the exact reports and datasets to pull
- From CBO: download data from “Budget and Economic Data” and the “Baseline Projections for Selected Programs” pages to get annual program outlays and projections for FY2020–FY2024 [1] [2]. Use the health-subsidy and long-term outlook publications for program-specific context and totals [5] [6].
- From OMB/Treasury: pull the President’s Budget historical tables and the FY2024 Financial Report to get executive-branch accounting for outlays and functions through FY2024 [3].
- For federal credit programs and subsidy accounting, use CBO’s FCRA-based estimates report to capture government support classified as subsidies [4].
6. Limits, interpretation issues, and alternative sources to cross-check
CBO’s and OMB’s numbers are authoritative but not identical; differences reflect policy and methodological choices, so any per-capita calculation should show which dataset and definitions were used [8]. The Fiscal Year 2024 Financial Report links OMB and Treasury bookkeeping but may present different functional groupings than CBO, and credit-program estimates use a distinct FCRA framework that changes how “subsidy” is measured [3] [4]. Non-government aggregators (e.g., usgovernmentspending.com) compile and visualize this material, but those are secondary and should be cross-checked against CBO/OMB/Treasury primary tables [9] [10] [11].
7. Recommended citation-ready workflow
Download program-level CSV/XLS from CBO’s data pages for FY2020–FY2024 [1], pull the corresponding OMB/Treasury outlay totals from the FY2024 Financial Report and OMB historical tables [3], then divide by Census or OMB population numbers (not provided in these sources) to produce per-capita figures — and report both CBO- and OMB-based per-capita series side-by-side so readers see the methodological divergence [8] [3].
If you want, I can fetch and assemble the specific CBO tables and the OMB/Treasury lines for welfare and corporate-subsidy categories for FY2020–FY2024 and produce a per-capita table (specifying which source and assumptions were used). Available sources do not mention whether you prefer OMB or CBO as the primary baseline.