BELLEVUE, Wash. — Steve Ballmer is on a mission and it has nothing to do with basketball or Microsoft.
As he sits in a Bellevue high rise, the former Microsoft CEO perks up and starts to talk.
“I started looking up government data to try to understand how much wealth got transferred in the United States,” said Ballmer, his pace picking up. “That got me interested in who pays taxes and what does it get spent on? It was very hard to get a coherent view, let alone a view that says, is any of it working?”
Ballmer’s eyes twinkle and he smiled.
“At some point, I said, 'I think this might be interesting to somebody else,'” Ballmer said.
Hence the birth of USAFacts, a tiny, non-partisan non-profit that has been operating now for five years out of office space in Bellevue.
There are only a few dozen data engineers and analysts involved, collating government data for years.
“It is so tough to get data from the U.S. government because there are 90,000 government entities and there are no standards about what data should be collected, when it should be reported, or how it should be reported,” said Poppy MacDonald, president of USAFacts.
MacDonald is a former editor at Politico, journalist and Capitol Hill veteran. She moved here to help run the site, which has, at times, collated numbers faster than the actual government.
“We go to our government agencies; they are civil servants who are collecting this data who have crossed multiple administrations," MacDonald said. "We simply make that data accessible. We don't do forecasting; we don't provide predictions. We think that is where judgment comes into place."
In fact, early on in the COVID-19 pandemic, USAFacts provided data to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the White House about COVID. The analysts have also put together reports on everything from climate change to immigration to abortion.
There is one thing that is purposely missing.
“Not using adjectives, not casting judgment on the data that we’re seeing," MacDonald said. “It’s just saying the data was here. It’s there. It’s gone up. It’s gone down by the numbers, just the facts.”
“Adjectives provide some bias,” Ballmer said. “Somebody could say, 'Wow, this number has doubled.' Somebody else could say, 'It moved from one to two.' People might view those two things differently.”
It is also clear there has been a fight to preserve the facts in a polarized world with cable news, and social media.
“People have a short attention span,” Ballmer said. “We have to make sure this stuff is more digestible because there are people who just don’t love numbers. For democracy, people have to be able to get the facts."