Because the government doesn’t have a bank account, they have tens of thousands of them all with different rules, and they don’t spend the same money they taxed
Money is just numbers at this point, and so Congress comes up with numbers to fund everything they want to do, they come up with formulas to tax various things, and the two sets of numbers have no real relationship to each other
To add to this, some spending is done in chunks for the year or doled out every month.
Some money may be given back to the government if it isn’t spent.
Some money is purposefully cryptic in its spending for national security reasons.
There are a lot of things that make it difficult to accurately track things against the entire government, which is why auditing individual departments/agencies is how it’s usually done. However, even then it should be better than it is.
Because the government doesn’t have a bank account, they have tens of thousands of them all with different rules, and they don’t spend the same money they taxed
Money is just numbers at this point, and so Congress comes up with numbers to fund everything they want to do, they come up with formulas to tax various things, and the two sets of numbers have no real relationship to each other
To add to this, some spending is done in chunks for the year or doled out every month.
Some money may be given back to the government if it isn’t spent.
Some money is purposefully cryptic in its spending for national security reasons.
There are a lot of things that make it difficult to accurately track things against the entire government, which is why auditing individual departments/agencies is how it’s usually done. However, even then it should be better than it is.