Microsoft CEO Creates USAFacts Using Analytics to Track Government Spending

According to Governing, Steve Ballmer, former CEO of Microsoft, has come up with a way to show Americans how the government is spending its money. His solution is USAFacts, a website that contains data compiled by economists and researchers to show how government officials raise money, where that money goes, and what outcomes that money obtained.

Governing says that Ballmer sees USAFacts as a “critical tool for strengthening democracy via timely, digestible and objective information,” especially in an era of fake news. The website is dedicated to collecting data from all levels of U.S. government because “that’s the only way to tell the full story of public spending,” Ballmer told Governing.

Thomas Cafcas, a senior analyst for USAFacts, told Governing that the financial data produced by states and localities are difficult for the average person to collect and interpret. “They just overwhelm users with a wild torrent of data that is less contextualized than what we’re trying to do,” Cafcas told Governing.

Governing also says that state and local spending data are in the 2017 and 2018 annual reports, and that USAFacts is working on providing more details of the spending and outcomes at the state and local level. Ultimately, USAFacts workers would like average citizen to be able to view the analytics as broadly or as granularly as they’d like.

“We’re really interested in this idea of government, as a whole, spends $5.7 trillion. You can look at it as $5.7 trillion in one country, or you can look at $5.7 trillion divided up over 50 states, plus D.C. and U.S. territories. Or you can look at it as divided up into 3,000 counties, or 12,000 school districts,” Richard Coffin, director of USAFacts, told Governing. “We’re trying to show people how the full spending gets to different places and how outcomes — college degrees, dropout rates, crime rates, anything you can think of aggregated in long form — look in these different geographies as well.”

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