Having somehow found myself looking at a discussion of the US budget in a Stellaris thread, I can provide a small bit of info from professional experience:
As has been noted, there's the split between so-called Mandatory spending and Discretionary spending.
Here's a handy set of charts from the White House's Office of Management and Budget:
https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/budget/fy2017/assets/tables.pdf (just look at 2015 and 2016; the later years are merely projections under the President's proposed budget and pretty much never become law).
"Mandatory" is spending that is effectively automatic, pursuant to a previously-passed law. Congress could always change that law (with all the checks and balancing that passing a piece of legislation requires), but absent that the checks will be sent out.
"Discretionary" is spending that Congress must actively appropriate every fiscal year - that is, they must pass legislation directing how the money be spent (with varying degrees of specificity). When you hear talk about government shutdowns on the news, it's about Congress failing to pass the appropriations bills.
Discretionary, in turn, is often considered within two buckets: Defense Discretionary (DD) and Non-Defense Discretionary (NDD).
DD is the Department of Defense, plus some anti-terrorism bits and pieces from other agencies like the Dept. of Homeland Security, and generally makes up roughly half of the discretionary budget. There's also the magic slush fund known as "Overseas Contingency Operations," or OCO. OCO is just extra spending to get around budget caps that are in current law; these days it often adds up to roughly 10% additional funding to DD. There's also the black budget, which from what little we know probably works out to an additional 7-10% additional funding on top of OCO.
NDD is 'everything else' - transit, public lands, housing, energy, education, a whole slew of stuff. My work tends to be related to this bucket, but no need to get into further detail on this bucket here. I'll just add that NDD has its own form of OCO in a way: Emergency spending (e.g. funding to assist with things like natural disasters or epidemics). Usually not quite as big as OCO, but can still reach tens of billions of dollars per year.
(There are, of course, exceptions in both piles - some defense spending is only nominally related to actual defense, while some some military-related accounts like Veterans Affairs is NDD.)
In fiscal year 2016, mandatory "outlays" (that is, what's actually
spent as opposed to what they merely planned to spend) were roughly 2.5 trillion dollars. Discretionary outlays were roughly 1.2 trillion dollars. Of Discretionary, roughly half was DD (600ish billion, which includes OCO but not the black budget).
[edit: I remembered my OMB charting methods wrong, and changed how I described OCO - it's in there after all, sorry.]
Bottom line, it's very roughly 600-700 billion out of total spending of 3.7 trillion dollars, or a little under 20 percent. At the same time, when Congress sits down and writes their annual omnibus appropriations bill (having failed to pass the individual bills they're supposed to but almost never actually do) about 50 percent goes to Defense. It's a bit Tomato, Tomahto.
All that said, being militaristic can be cultural as much as it is spending buckets of cash. The latest patch got rid of the upkeep bonuses for being militaristic, right?
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Topic: Stellaris: Paradox Interactive IN SPACE (Read 1743572 times)