Discretionary outlays—The 2010 and 2011 figures were the highest in about 20 years.
...the part of federal spending that lawmakers generally control through annual appropriation acts—totaled about $1.35 trillion in 2011, or close to 40 percent of federal outlays. Slightly more than half of that spending was for defense....Discretionary outlays declined from about 10 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) during much of the 1970s and 1980s to 6.2 percent in 1999, mostly because defense spending, as a share of GDP, declined over that period. Since then, discretionary outlays have risen relative to the size of the economy, totaling about 9 percent of GDP in 2010 and 2011, in part because of military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq and in part because of the discretionary funding provided by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA, Public Law 111-5).
