What pie charts are you referring to, ones coming from the likes of Occupy Democrats? They exaggerate claims and have failed many fact checks over the years-
[usatoday.com]

In reality, Social Security and Medicare constituted more than a third of the budget in 2022, and that's no tiny amount, and even beat out defense spending. The Tax Foundation are a more reliable source for factual data by the way, and I trust them far more than a propaganda site that spends its time trying to convince people everything will be okay if we just keep spending more and more and that no kind of reforms would be required to keep the social welfare programs going.-
[taxfoundation.org]

Ignoring financial issues does not make them go away...

@SpikeTalon sorry, but I Googled "Pie Chart of USA budget" and got at least 6 sources that basically agreed that Defense takes up the Huge majority of spending..
I almost never depend on one source as I hate looking like a fool, BTW.

@annewimsey500 I cited three sources in the OP above and two more in my previous reply... what do you mean by one source?

If you really Googled and came across that many sources, links please, otherwise I can't take your claim seriously. From reliable sources of information please (rated high in credibility regarding fact checks), and not just opinion sources. Plenty of websites out there that only give mere opinions, and try to pass-off said opinions as established facts.

Also, the point of this post was to show that social welfare programs are a contributing factor to the growing national debt. I'm not concerned about which thing directly cost us the most in the budget, as that would be beside the point, and still wouldn't remove the fact that programs like Social Security and Medicare are costing us trillions and thus contributing to the debt.

Here's another source by the way, from Fiscal Data Treasury.com which is a Government website. The chart in the linked-to article is for the fiscal year 2024 to date, top spending by category and agency. According to Government statistics, Social Security takes up 22% of spending while national defense takes 14%, and Medicare comes in at 12%. That means SS and Medicare combined comes in at 34% of the spending, which is over a third of the total budget just in those two social welfare programs alone. Where agencies are concerned, the Social Security Administration ranks at #2 with 23% while the Department of Defense comes in at #4 with 13%.-
[fiscaldata.treasury.gov]

Those statistics are from an official Government source, and they tell a very different story than what you were trying to pitch above. What sources were you looking at anyway... ones that were seriously dated like back from 2010 or so??