Does the US spend more on interest than on defense?

What this number cannot tell you

• Net interest is the budget's own measure: interest paid less interest received, with the interest credited to the government's own trust funds taken out. Gross interest expense, which includes that interest, is a larger figure and is on the interest cost page. A comparison made with gross interest can come out differently from one made with net interest. This page uses net interest only.
• National defense is budget function 050: the Defense Department's military programs, the Energy Department's defense activities and other defense-related work. The Defense Department row is the department's own total in table 5, which is narrower. Both are shown, because the period in which net interest first passes one can differ from the period for the other.
• Health is budget function 550 and holds Medicaid, which table 9 does not print as a line of its own, the premium subsidies of the Affordable Care Act and public health. Income security holds food assistance, unemployment benefits, refundable tax credits, Supplemental Security Income and federal retirement. Social Security and Medicare are the functions as the statement prints them, Medicare in net outlays. The statement counts on-budget and off-budget accounts together, and Social Security is mostly off-budget.
• A period of 12 months is the sum of twelve months of the statement, except that a period ending in September is the Treasury's own figure for the fiscal year to date, so the fiscal-year rows and the periods print the same amounts. The Defense Department row is always the sum of twelve months, since table 5 gives no year to date here. The year to date can differ from the sum of its months where the Treasury moved spending between functions after the months were printed. The differences above a billion dollars, the year to date less the sum of the twelve months, in billions of dollars: fiscal 2018 national defense +15.9 and health −15.9; fiscal 2019 national defense −13.8 and health +13.9.
• A payment due on a weekend or a holiday is booked in the month before, so a 12-month total can move by tens of billions at one month-end, and a line can be above another in one period and below it in the next. The column Above in every period since is there for that.
• A single month swings: net interest was the lowest month of the fiscal year in September in each of the 11 complete fiscal years, 2016 to 2026.
• The figures are in dollars of their own period. They are not adjusted for prices or the size of the economy.
• The Treasury revises its statement after it first prints it. This page shows the amounts as stored when it was built.
• Table 9 begins in March 2015 in the data the Treasury's Fiscal Data service gives; older statements are published as documents only. The first 12-month period ends in February 2016, because it needs twelve months. The first fiscal year is 2015, the 12 months to 30 September 2015, which needs only the statement of that September.