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Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has a new project, and it may just surprise you.<\/p>\n
Ballmer\u00a0is these days mostly known for owning the\u00a0Los Angeles Clippers basketball team and a significant Twitter stake<\/a>, but this week he is taking the wraps off USAFacts<\/a>, a website chock-full of data related to U.S. government spending.<\/p>\n The idea is to present the facts around the government, and its use of money, in a simple way that hasn\u2019t be done to date. The New York Times reports<\/a> that Ballmer has spent over $10 million on the three-year-old project, that includes hiring a team of Seattle-based\u00a0researchers and giving a grant to\u00a0the University of Pennsylvania to help gather data. The paper said he is prepared to continue to bankroll the program\u00a0at an estimated cost of $3 million-5 million per year.<\/p>\n Ballmer, who describes the site as a 10K for the government, is particularly famous\u00a0for his appreciation of numbers and data in arguments, which spills over\u00a0from business\u00a0into his personal life, too.<\/p>\n \u201cI would like citizens to be able to use this to form intelligent opinions. People can disagree about what to do \u2014 I\u2019m not going to tell people what to do,\u201d he told the Times, adding that opinions should be based on \u201con common data sets that are believable.\u201d<\/p>\n USAFacts isn\u2019t available\u00a0to the public at the time of writing \u2014 a holding page says it will open up in \u201cSpring 2017\u201d \u2014\u00a0but it is expected to go live on Tuesday.<\/p>\n The project was first announced last November \u2014 through an interview with Bloomberg<\/a> \u2014 and Ballmer stressed that it is nonpartisan and wholly factual.<\/p>\n Former President Barack\u00a0Obama opened the veil on government data when he introduced an open data portal that provided some public information, but things are less clear under current President Trump<\/a>. Obama-era data has been archived<\/a>\u00a0and cleared, but thus far the Trump administration has neither posted new data nor commented on its plans for the system.<\/p>\n Ballmer said USAFacts takes some data from the White House project,\u00a0alongside other government sources. The only rule, according to Ballmer, is to avoid information from outside parties\u00a0in order to remain accurate.<\/p>\n Featured Image: Microsoft Sweden<\/a>\/Flickr<\/a> UNDER A CC BY 2.0<\/a> LICENSE (IMAGE HAS BEEN MODIFIED)<\/small><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"![\"Steve](\"https:\/\/tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com\/2014\/11\/screen-shot-2014-11-11-at-4-30-49-pm.png?w=680\")
Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has a new project, and it may just surprise you. Ballmer\u00a0is these days mostly known for owning the\u00a0Los Angeles Clippers basketball team and a significant Twitter stake, but this week he is taking the wraps off USAFacts, a website chock-full of data related to U.S. government spending. The idea is to present the facts around the government, and its use of… Read More<\/a><\/p>\n\n<\/img><\/a>
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