Thanks for joining us. I am delighted to welcome budget guru, Jessica Reedle today, to talk about the ins and outs of the budget, federal spending doge, and related matters. So thanks so much for being here, Jessica.

All right.

So we have the image now of Elon Musk with his chainsaw going through the federal budget in a very discriminating and careful fashion.

One of the things I hope you can clarify for listeners is because there are a lot of us who've

always been interested in fiscal responsibility, taking budget deficits

seriously. But let's talk about discretionary spending. You know, back in the old days,

before you were born probably, Ross Perrault, who was like a big budget cutter of his day, although a little bit crazy.

But anyway, he used to have these pie charts that he would bring on TV to show people how much we were spending and where.

And I wonder if we could tap into that just a little bit because what Doge is doing is just going after discretionary spending. So if you could

sketch out a little bit, like, how do we spend our money, our federal money? What percentage is actually

discretionary spending? Sure. And I will date myself by saying I was in high school when

Ross Perrault was running for president in 1992, but I appreciate the compliment of you not being born yet.

So if you just step back first and look at the entire federal budget, 75% of all federal spending goes to six items.

Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, defense,

veterans and interest. That's three quarters of the budget. Discretionary spending is the part

with defense and veterans in there. Discretionary spending is about 30% of the budget. It's the

portion of federal spending that actually goes

through the budget process and is not on autopilot automatically like say Social Security is.

So it's about 30% of the budget, more than half of discretionary spending goes to defense,

veterans, and border security, which conservatives

generally support. You also have things like foreign aid, health research, education, housing,

a lot of government administration, some of the FAA, FAA, highway spending, highway spending, transportation, Coast Guard.

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