Barack Obama

Total U.S. federal outlays for each fiscal year of Obama’s term. That’s the whole federal budget — mostly Social Security, Medicare, defense, interest on the debt, and prior commitments already on the books before this term began — not money Obama personally directed. A president proposes, Congress appropriates, and no single official controls the total.

Nominal dollars — not adjusted for inflation. Bar lengths compare dollars of different years, so a longer bar can be higher prices rather than more spending. The same bars in comparable money — FY2025 dollars, on the government’s own outlay deflator — run $5.05T in FY2009 to $5.07T in FY2017, and FY2009 and FY2017 are only partly inside this term — the share is marked on those bars. Any two fiscal years, deflated and broken out by what the money bought, are at federal spending by year.

Source: OMB Historical Tables, Table 1.1 (Summary of Receipts, Outlays, and Surpluses or Deficits: 1789-present) · figures · compiled Sept. 8, 2026. Fiscal years run Oct–Sep, so a term’s first and last fiscal year each overlap the neighbouring president’s term — marked above with the share that fell inside this term.

How each U.S. national outcome moved during the term, with the median across OECD member states alongside for context. This is not a grade: a president shares credit with Congress, the Fed, the states and the world, and outcomes lag policy by years. It’s what happened, not a scorecard. Every outcome here runs the full term, 2009–2017.

U.S. series: BLS, CDC WONDER, CDC/NCHS, NCES/NAEP, OECD, OMB Historical Tables, USDA ERS — each row’s “View source” opens the series behind its numbers. Peer medians: FAO, OECD, World Bank — the median value across OECD member states, not any one country’s value, over the country count shown on each row (membership and reporting both change year to year). “Direction” marks whether the number moved the better way for that single metric; it is never summed into an overall score. “→” marks a context metric with no better direction — inflation (cpi), total tax burden, federal receipts are reported, not judged. “No change” means both endpoints round to the same figure the source itself publishes, so no move can be claimed. The peer column carries its own years because several of those series begin later than the U.S. one. The two food-security measures are not like for like — the U.S. figure is USDA household food insecurity, the peer figure is an FAO population measure that FAO publishes only as three-year moving averages, dated here by the middle year of each window.

The same numbers as the card above, year by year instead of endpoint to endpoint — because on some series the endpoints hide the shape of what happened in between. Drawn, not judged: each chart states the metric’s own direction status from the card.

The identical metric set for every completed presidential term in this file — matched by series, not chosen here. Compared on 11 of 11 metrics on Obama’s card — the whole card matched. Each line runs from the value at the start of the measured window to the value at the end: open circle the start, filled circle the end. Where the export carries a peer median on the same basis, a dashed rail above the line shows what the median OECD member state did in the same years. This is not a grade: no score, no rank, no winner, and no count of who moved more rows the better way. Nothing here is added up across metrics.

The terms are not the same length — Obama 44th 8 years, Trump 45th 4 years and Biden 46th 4 years. A longer window has more years in which a number can move, in either direction. Each row is also labelled with the years its own source actually covers, which is not always the whole term.

Every row shows a movement during a term, not a result of it: a president shares credit with Congress, the Fed, the states and the world, and national outcomes lag policy by years. “Improved” and “worsened” describe the single number on that line, in the direction its own source treats as better; they are never summed into a score, a rank or a total. Rows marked “reported, not judged” have no better direction at all — they are shown because they are part of the same fixed set, not because a move in either direction would be good. The rule set is the same for every term on this page, and the same on every president’s page.