TRANSPARENCY: Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer discusses USAFacts, his “10-K for government”

GeekWire: Your new project is called USAFacts. You’ve described it as a 10-K for government. Can you explain what it is?

Steve Ballmer: USAFacts is an initiative, if you will — which we’ll publish in PDF, we’ve got a nice website, a lot of different things — but it’s an initiative designed to really simplify and give clear focus to what’s going on with our government. How much money do we take in? How much money do we spend? Against what set of goals? And what kind of outcomes does government get? We take a whole new perspective. We innovated in a number of ways. You won’t find anything like it on the web. We innovated in terms of taking a decision-maker focus — being goal-oriented, not program-oriented.

We looked at the Constitution and said, “what’s the mission of government? Let’s break it down by mission and ask how we’re doing.” The 10-K analogy isn’t bad, but unlike a business, it’s about what you achieve for the citizens first and then how you pay for it as opposed to making money, if you will, or making a profit. We are very citizen-oriented, so it’s not just what the government does for citizens overall, but it’s what the government actually does for specific groups of citizens. And so we look at 10 different groups of citizens and we say, “How does what government do impact a variety of different citizen types?” And that’s kind of what we are.

Now if only Washington would look at the Constitution and say, “What’s the mission of government?”