Government Purchases by Purpose

¶ 2024 Government Consumption Expenditures and Gross Investment by Function.

A few things to note:

• Housing and Community Services is mostly water, electricity, waste management.
• The market value of Gov purchases for GDP accounting is often just imputed as the cost of the input.
  • For example, the salaries of IRS employees are included under “tax collection” and the salaries of many social workers are included under “Income Security”.
• Transfers, Interest Payments, and Subsidies are not included. If we include those, the graph looks like the following:

¶ 2024 Government Expenditures by Function.

The Breakdown of Social Security payments into its three components comes from SSA ASS Table 5j. The total values at the top include payments to people living in Territories and abroad. In contrast, the values from BEA Table 3.12 separates transfers to non-US residents (Puerto Rico, mainly) into a separate line item.

And the above is an alternate presentation that groups Consumption, Investment, and Transfers by Function.

¶ Sources:

BEA Table 3.15.5
Table 3.15.5 on FRED (More functional web design, but less up to date.)
Table 3.12 on FRED
Table 3.16 on FRED
Table 2.17 on FRED