Ranking Member Sessions and the minority staff of the Senate Budget Committee requested from the
nonpartisan Congressional Research Service (CRS) an overview of cumulative means-tested federal
welfare spending in the United States in the most recent year for which data is available (fiscal year 2011).
The results are staggering. CRS identified 83 overlapping federal welfare programs that together
represented the single largest budget item in 2011more than the nation spends on Social Security,
Medicare, or national defense. The total amount spent on these 80-plus federal welfare programs
amounts to roughly $1.03 trillion. Importantly, these figures solely refer to means-tested welfare benefits.
They exclude entitlement programs to which people contribute (e.g., Social Security and Medicare).
CRS estimates that exclusively federal spending on these federal programs equaled approximately $746
billion, and further emphasizes that there is a substantial amount of state spendingmostly required as a
condition of states participationon these same federal programs (primarily Medicaid and CHIP). Based
on data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and the Oxford Handbook of State and Local
Government Finance, Budget Committee staff calculated at least an additional $283 billion in state
contributions to those same federal programs, for a total annual expenditure of $1.03 trillion. By
comparison, in 2011, the annual budget expenditure for Social Security was $725 billion, Medicare was
$480 billion, and non-war defense was $540 billion.
The exclusively federal share of spending on these federal programs is up 32 percent since 2008, and now
comprises 21 percent of federal outlays (this share too is more than Social Security, Medicare, or defense).