Social Security Administration

In Fiscal Year 2025, Social Security Administration (SSA) obligated $602.5B against a congressional budget authority of $630.1B, reflecting a 95.6% utilization rate. This places the agency at rank #2 out of 111 federal agencies tracked in USASpending.gov, providing a concrete picture of how much of its authorized money the agency actually committed through contracts, grants, loans, and direct assistance during the fiscal year.

The composition of those obligations is instructive: direct payments dominate at $307.9K (0.0% of total obligations), followed by contracts at $4.1K and grants at $239. Contracts totaled $4.1K and grants totaled $239, two signals that distinguish procurement-heavy agencies from those whose primary role is distributing financial assistance to states, nonprofits, and research institutions.

The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has recorded 53 terminations at SSA with $39.3M in claimed savings — a meaningful but unverified slice of this agency's FY2025 footprint. Readers should weigh the gap between $630.1B in authority and $602.5B in obligations alongside post-FY2025 terminations to gauge the agency's real trajectory.

Two numbers anchor every agency profile on this site, and they are worth separating clearly. Budget authority is the ceiling Congress sets, the most an agency is legally allowed to commit. Obligated amount is what the agency has actually committed through signed contracts, awarded grants, loans, and direct payments. The gap between the two is the agency's spending pace, and it is normal for an agency to obligate less than its full authority within a single fiscal year because some money carries forward. All of the figures here come from USASpending.gov, the federal spending-transparency system the U.S. Treasury has operated since the DATA Act of 2014, which standardized agency reporting across the federal government. Federal outlays exceeded 6,750 billion dollars in fiscal year 2024, so even a mid-sized agency can command obligations larger than many state budgets. Because these are official government submissions rather than third-party estimates, they are a reliable baseline, though late-posted awards and corrections can shift totals after the fiscal year closes. Our methodology explains how each agency total is assembled and when the data was retrieved.