Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer isn't satisfied with owning the Los Angeles Clippers and teaching at Stanford and USC.
He's also trying to improve political discourse by making government financial data easier to access. And he's doing it by publishing data structured similarly to the 10-K filings companies issue each year — expenses, revenues and key metrics pulled from dozens of government data sources and compiled into a single massive collection of tables.
Companies typically organize revenue into segments, and Ballmer's USAFacts team has done the same. The U.S. government "10-K" pulls its segments from the missions mandated by the preamble to the Constitution:
- Establish justice and ensure domestic tranquility
- Provide for the common defense
- Promote the general welfare
- Secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.
Here's how the spending on those missions has increased over the last few decades: