Let’s presume that the United States is a company.
Unlike a lot of Silicon Valley in 2017, the entity we might hypothetically call America Inc. has already gone public. For better or worse, its founders still loom large over the aging place, but they actually don’t run it anymore. (Instead, it’s some new guy whom many folks find trenchant.) Nevertheless, this upstart operation regularly has to convince its shareholders that it can deliver on long-hyped promises of prosperity.
That’s some of the mentality, at least, behind USAFacts, a new effort by former Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer to bring a business-minded eye to the U.S. government, its multi-trillion dollar budget and its effects on voters’ lives. For months, the numbers-obsessed Ballmer has toiled to harness a trove of publicly available — yet oft-ignored — state and federal government data stores. The result, debuting on Tuesday in time for Tax Day, stems from a belief that voters and regulators alike could make better decisions if only they had unbiased, unpolluted information at their fingertips.
“I think a lot of information is put out to make a point,” Ballmer told Recode in an interview. “People take a point of view, but then they pick the data that makes their point of view.”
To escape all the noise, Ballmer and his crew instead have sought to break down the government’s balance sheet with the help of the U.S. Constitution. They’ve diced up roughly $5.4 trillion in U.S. spending into four categories, all derived from the historical document’s preamble. Expenses for the military, for example, are computed under the well-known verse that the U.S. “provide for the common defense.” And each section comes with a tableau of “key metrics,” like statistics on the number of U.S. veterans and the cost of providing them care.
Of course, journalists already gather such facts about federal spending and the other areas that Ballmer’s new initiative explores. From simple Google and Wikipedia searches to deeper number-crunching work published by nonprofits like the Sunlight Foundation, there’s an existing wealth of scannable data about U.S. tax dollars and how, and on whom, they’re spent.
Ballmer, though, argues the data out there is mostly insufficient — that the statistics undergirding major political debates are hard to track, and sometimes tainted by bias.
“There’s no — at least, I couldn’t find an — integrated source of data, because to me integrated is important. If everything is integrated, everything has to add to 100 percent, no numbers can be taken out of context,” Ballmer said. That includes journalism. “I don’t think journalists do a bad job,” he explained, “but I think journalists do take a topic, and it makes it harder to look at things holistically and in context.
