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The six universal dives are asked of every subject at this tier. This is not one of them. It exists because of one thing this subject has been — office-holder — and a subject who has not been that never gets this page. That is why this record has 11 overlay dives to write rather than a number every record shares. All six base dives were written first, and that ordering is a rule rather than a habit: an overlay dive published on its own is a page about the part of someone chosen by whoever built it.
Unlike the companies dive, this one is carried by an overlay the other two records also have, so it will exist for them too. Where a figure here also appears on a subject page, the subject page is upstream and this one is the error.
The six base dives and the other 10 overlay dives are listed on the full record.
Before any figure about fiscal control means anything, this is the number that bounds it. Discretionary spending is the part Congress appropriates annually and a president signs or vetoes. The rest pays out by formula until a law changes it.
Share of total outlays. OMB Historical Table 8.1 — outlays by Budget Enforcement Act category, actuals only, earliest year 1962.
The share of federal spending set by the annual appropriations process — the part a president signs or vetoes — has fallen from just over two-thirds in 1962 to about a quarter now. The low point in the series is 2021, at 24.0%. Nothing about that trend is the doing of any one president: it is what happens when programmes that pay benefits by formula grow faster than programmes funded a year at a time. It is the first thing to know before reading any figure about fiscal control, because it bounds all of them.
One of seventeen dives on the full record. The tariff programmes themselves are a subject in their own right on Tariffs & Trade, which owns that series; this page borrows only the revenue line and only to measure control. The same record is being built for Joe Biden and Barack Obama, both of whom carry this overlay and will get this dive.