More than 25 cents of every discretionary dollar spent by the federal government is unauthorized, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. Basically, that means that more than a quarter, $310 billion, of the federal budget’s appropriations are spent on autopilot.

That portion is actually down one percentage point from 2015, when it reached a historical peak of 27 percent. The unauthorized portion of the budget has been on a gradual rise since 1993, when just 6 percent of discretionary spending was unauthorized.