The Labor Department's money — mandatory and discretionary, never conflated.
Office of the Chief Financial Officer · U.S. Department of Labor
Most of the Department of Labor's budget is mandatory — the Unemployment Trust Fund, which pays state unemployment benefits and swings sharply with the economy. The appropriated, discretionary budget Congress sets each year — workforce training (WIOA), OSHA, MSHA, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Wage & Hour, and the rest — is a smaller fraction of the total. This monitor keeps the two strictly apart. FY2025 actuals, FY2026 enacted, and the FY2027 request; every number recomputes against its own source.
Mandatory · FY2027
Set by law and the economy, not annual appropriations — the bulk of DOL
Discretionary · FY2027
The appropriated budget Congress sets each year
Mandatory and discretionary figures are both from the DOL FY2027 Budget in Brief, but they are never summed into a single “DOL budget” number. The Unemployment Trust Fund alone is roughly four times the entire discretionary budget — and it spiked into the hundreds of billions of obligations during the FY2020-2021 pandemic. The discretionary figure shown is the Summary-of-Discretionary-Funds total that the agency-group breakdown below foots to; the All Purpose Table's “TOTAL, DISCRETIONARY” and the President's Budget $9.9B annual-appropriation headline differ by budgetary adjustments and the FY2027 legislative proposals — all carried and flagged on the methodology page.