After Steve Ballmer retired as the chief executive officer of Microsoft in 2014, his wife suggested he join her in her philanthropic work with foster children. He had thought it was mostly the government’s responsibility, but his wife told him, “We can do a little more, a little better,” he recalls. He soon found himself more curious about how the government gets and spends its money: Who pays taxes and how much? How much does that go to helping low-income communities?
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]And most importantly: why wasn’t all of this information more accessible?
This led in 2017 to the launch of Ballmer’s passion project—a nonprofit, nonpartisan website called USAFacts that breaks down government data for the public in a straight-forward, accessible manner. For Ballmer, the project is meant to cut through the cherry-picked facts of so much political discourse to help people engage in “a proper debate grounded in what’s going on.” He likens USAFacts’ reports to 10-Ks—a form that U.S. public companies file with the Securities and Exchange Commission each year with critical information about their business.
“Just as businesses need to present themselves to their shareholders, to customers, so I think government should have to,” Ballmer says.
In August, USAFacts released its first in a series of videos, called “Just the Facts.” One features Ballmer speaking for about 14 minutes on immigration, including the meaning and numbers behind terms like “unauthorized immigrants” and “Temporary Protected Status.” Another on the U.S. federal budget digs into the costs of entitlement programs like Medicaid and Social Security. Neither video could be described as thrilling. Yet each has drawn millions of views on YouTube. USAFacts is also paying to run its videos on some Fox Network affiliates and NewsNation, according to USAFacts spokesperson Jessica Piha-Grafstein.
“We hope it can sort of inform the electorate coming into what’s going to happen in November,” says Ballmer.
The idea of releasing government data in a format that the public can understand isn’t novel, Ballmer says, pointing to a quote by James Madison that he finds inspirational: “A popular government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy; or, perhaps both.”
“I believe that,” Ballmer says. “[If] we want to have a popular government, we better have popular information or we will get a tragedy; we will get a farce. And I might worry sometimes about our political environment going those directions.”
