Section 1 · Version 1.0 LOCKED
Executive Summary
Plain-English overview
The federal government collects taxes and spends them. Some spending benefits full U.S. citizens; some benefits people who are not citizens — either people abroad or non-citizens living in the United States. This audit counts, as far as primary federal records allow, how much identifiable spending is directed toward non-U.S. recipients, and it marks precisely where the government stops reporting by citizenship status. Where the record runs out, the audit documents the gap instead of guessing.
What the audit measured
Overseas gross Total A: International assistance was approximately $71.9B disbursed and approximately $99.9B obligated in FY2023, and approximately $85.8B obligated in FY2024. Net-new military assistance includes USAI plus PDA-replacement at approximately $50.9B cumulative obligations for the Ukraine-surge multi-year lane, plus Section 333 and CTEF at approximately $1.6B per year recurring.
Domestic gross Total A: Noncitizen SSI is approximately $2.21B on the Dec. 2021 basis. Emergency Medicaid is approximately $3.8B federal plus state for FY2023, with the federal-only share carried as permanent flagged limitation A-037. Most other domestic spending touching non-citizens is unquantifiable from primary evidence and is documented rather than estimated.
These figures rest on incompatible bases: single-year versus cumulative, disbursement versus obligation, federal versus federal-plus-state, and point-in-time. They are reported as basis-segregated lane subtotals. No single blended grand total is produced.
The measurement rules applied throughout
Gross, not net. Every figure is money directed toward non-citizens; it is not netted against taxes those non-citizens pay.
Recipient is not always economic beneficiary. A documented but largely unquantified share is captured by U.S. entities such as hospitals, retailers, landlords, shelter operators, states, and U.S. industry.
Citizen-child benefits excluded. Benefits paid for U.S.-citizen children in mixed-status households are citizen benefits and are not counted as non-citizen spending.
No manufactured certainty. Where an agency does not publish spending by citizenship status, the audit routes the figure to a documented gap instead of applying a population share to a program total.
The central transparency finding
For most domestic programs, the federal government does not publish spending by citizenship or immigration status. Some data are not collected; in one case, K-12 under Plyler v. Doe, collection is constitutionally barred; in others the data exist but are not reported in a form that isolates the population or federal share. SSI is the status-transparent benchmark; the least transparent programs include some of the largest potential exposures.
Conclusions supported beyond reasonable methodological dispute
- Identifiable federal spending directed toward non-U.S. recipients is large overseas and, domestically, small where measurable.
- Undocumented immigrants are statutorily barred from nearly all federal benefits; measurable non-citizen domestic spending is on lawfully-present eligibles.
- Non-citizens are a small share of the major means-tested caseloads examined.
- The recipient of a benefit is frequently not its economic beneficiary.
- The completeness of any such accounting is bounded by federal disclosure practice.
What remains uncertain
Total B remains uncertain where capture share is unpublished (A-005). Other unresolved items include domestic non-citizen totals beyond SSI, the federal-only emergency-Medicaid share (A-037), ORR consolidated outlays (A-018), and the SSI point-in-time basis (A-028).
Bottom line
The audit reports a known-minimum: a set of figures, each tied to a primary source, fiscal basis, and confidence, presented separately because they cannot lawfully be summed into one number. What it does not report, it does not estimate. Every absent figure is named, attributed to an agency, and paired with the record that would resolve it. The principal finding is the documented boundary between what is publicly measurable and what is not — not any single total.
Hostile-reader reconciliation
The draft FY2024 and FY2025 figures and abandoned upper-bound framing were removed. The section was aligned to locked Sections 3, 5, 7, 9, and 14. Correct rules were preserved, and no locked conclusion was omitted.