During Pie Week, we’ve explored three types of federal spending pies: total, mandatory, and discretionary. Judging from your comments on our Facebook page, you have strong opinions about the numbers on these charts.

To wrap up the week, we think it’s important to see the spending charts next to one another and understand the relationships between them. Below is an experimental way to make these charts more interactive. Just hover over the pie slices and click them to see the detailed data.

Educational? Confusing? Leave a comment and let us know what you think.

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Pie Week continues today with the part of the federal budget that often receives the most scrutiny: discretionary spending.

Discretionary spending is often the most scrutinized part of the federal budget because it's the part that lawmakers directly determine each year during the appropriations process. That makes discretionary spending different from mandatory spending, which is determined not at the discretion of lawmakers, but rather by how many people qualify for benefits from mandatory programs like Medicare. Check out yesterday's post for the mandatory pie.

And stay tuned! We'll have another fresh slice of pie for you tomorrow.

This week we're talking about pie. Federal budget pies, that is. The first pie we're looking at is total federal spending.

Join us every day this week for a different slice of pie! Check back here or on Twitter and Facebook.

All sorts of great questions come in on our Facebook page. One question we hear a lot is, How much of the federal budget actually goes to the military? In some charts, you see that military is more than half the budget. But in others, you see that it's much less than that. This week at National Priorities Project we're talking about all different kinds of budget pies, so this is our chance: Let's settle this once and for all.

Out of the total federal budget, the military accounts for around 18 percent.

But then there's ...

In his last post, my research colleague Chris Hellman explained where we are in the annual federal budget process. He noted that President Obama released a budget in February; the House passed a very different budget in March; and the Senate has declined to do a budget. The seeds are planted for stalemate this election year, Chris wrote. If Congress cannot pass a budget for President Obama to sign by Oct. 1 – which is the start of fiscal year 2013 – then lawmakers will have to pass temporary spending legislation, called continuing resolutions, to fund the federal government.

Why can't ...

Rebecca from Lititz, Pennsylvania, asked: Why are there different versions of the budget, and who decides which one becomes the actual budget for the federal government?

It’s a good question. You might have read in the news recently about the House budget introduced by Rep. Paul Ryan. And back in February, you might have heard about President Obama’s new budget. So, how do these different proposals turn into a single federal budget?

President Obama's budget, released back in February, was a proposal for Congress to consider. And the recent House budget was a budget resolution. A budget ...