 | |
| Company type | Not-for-profit organization |
|---|---|
| Founded | 2016 |
| Founder | Steve Ballmer |
| Website | usafacts |
USAFacts is a not-for-profit organization and website that provides data and reports on the United States population, its government's finances, and government's impact on society. [1] [2] It was launched in 2017.
USAFacts was founded by former Microsoft CEO and owner of the Los Angeles Clippers, [3] Steve Ballmer. [4] [5] Ballmer invested his own money in the project. [6] USAFacts was launched on April 18, 2017 Tax Day, with the goal of making government data about tax revenues, expenditures, and outcomes more accessible and understandable. USAFacts's platform is designed to provide information to the public about government spending and impact at all levels, from federal to local. [7] [8] [9] It includes information about border apprehensions, climate, immigration, active shooters, medicare, education, military spending and opioids. [3] It also helps entrepreneurs to figure out the best location to launch or invest in businesses. [6]
At launch, the website gathered data from over 70 government agencies and pulls data from more than 130 US government statistical databases and reports. [10] Only official government data is included in the site. [11] [12] [4]
In September 2018, USAFacts launched a new Voter Center. This compares government data with the positions members of Congress state publicly and shares information about education, healthcare, tariffs, jobs, immigration, economy, guns, etc. Partners of the Vote Center are Countable, BallotReady and TurboVote. [13]
In November 2018 USAFacts partnered with GeekWire, to produce the podcast Numbers Geek. [14]
In October 2019, USAFacts linked up with U.S. News & World Report. This provided an outlet to share their data in visual form and in the context of the relevant daily matters to and at the same time increasing U.S. News' 2020 election coverage. [15]
In November 2019, USAFacts in cooperation with AP-Norc, conducted a poll which showed that more than 50% of Americans glean their government-related news from social media, while only 11% would trust its correctness and 64% saw it as untrustworthy information. [16] [17]
During the COVID-19 pandemic, USAFacts launched its USAFacts COVID-19 impact and Recovery Hub. It uses information of government sources, the Bureau of Economic Analysis and the Department of Labor. [18] [19] On March 20, 2020, USAFacts announced its Coronavirus Hub and Map which gives a frequently updated metrics on the daily spread and effect of COVID-19 throughout America. [20]
In 2020, USAFacts partnered with the global nonprofit Earth Day Network. [21]
President Poppy MacDonald testified in front of the United States House Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress in an October 2021 hearing called Strengthening the Lawmaking Process: How Data Can Inform and Improve Policy. She urged the government for more datasets are timely, contextual and relevant to Americans, and the need for more cross-agency and cross-government collaboration. [22]
In May 2020, USAFacts won the 2020 Webby Award for Government & Civil Innovation in the category Web. [23] [24]
In August 2021, Fast Company named USAFacts 14th on its third-annual Best Workplaces for Innovators list. [25]
USAFacts is privately funded by Steve Ballmer and does not accept any contributions from external donors. It is described as nonpartisan and does not have a board of directors as it is not a 501(c)(3) organization.
William Henry Gates III is an American businessman, investor, philanthropist, and writer best known for co-founding the software giant Microsoft, along with his childhood friend Paul Allen. During his career at Microsoft, Gates held the positions of chairman, chief executive officer (CEO), president, and chief software architect, while also being its largest individual shareholder until May 2014. He was a prominent pioneer of the microcomputer revolution of the 1970s and 1980s.
Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, United States. Microsoft's best-known software products are the Windows line of operating systems, the Microsoft 365 suite of productivity applications, and the Edge web browser. Its flagship hardware products are the Xbox video game consoles and the Microsoft Surface lineup of touchscreen personal computers. Microsoft ranked No. 14 in the 2022 Fortune 500 rankings of the largest United States corporations by total revenue; it was the world's largest software maker by revenue as of 2022. It is considered one of the Big Five American information technology companies, alongside Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, and Meta.
Nokia Corporation is a Finnish multinational telecommunications, information technology, and consumer electronics corporation, established in 1865. Nokia's main headquarters are in Espoo, Finland, in the greater Helsinki metropolitan area, but the company's actual roots are in the Tampere region of Pirkanmaa. In 2020, Nokia employed approximately 92,000 people across over 100 countries, did business in more than 130 countries, and reported annual revenues of around €23 billion. Nokia is a public limited company listed on the Helsinki Stock Exchange and New York Stock Exchange. It was the world's 415th-largest company measured by 2016 revenues, according to the Fortune Global 500, having peaked at 85th place in 2009. It is a component of the Euro Stoxx 50 stock market index.
Steven Anthony Ballmer is an American businessman and investor who was the chief executive officer of Microsoft from 2000 to 2014. He is the owner of the Los Angeles Clippers of the National Basketball Association (NBA). He is a co-founder of Ballmer Group, a philanthropic investment company. As of January 2024, Bloomberg Billionaires Index estimates his personal wealth at around $135 billion, making him the sixth-richest person in the world.
Paul Alistair Maritz is a computer scientist and software executive. He held positions at Microsoft and EMC Corporation. In October 2021, Maritz was named as the chairman of the board of directors for Acronis. He also serves as chairman of Pivotal Software.
Microsoft is a multinational computer technology corporation. Microsoft was founded on April 4, 1975, by Bill Gates and Paul Allen in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Its current best-selling products are the Microsoft Windows operating system; Microsoft Office, a suite of productivity software; Xbox, a line of entertainment of games, music, and video; Bing, a line of search engines; and Microsoft Azure, a cloud services platform.
Richard Barton is an American internet entrepreneur and the chief executive officer of Zillow Group. Barton founded online travel company Expedia, Inc., real-estate internet company Zillow, and job search engine and career community Glassdoor. He also founded the online travel photography sharing website and app Trover, which was acquired by Expedia in 2016. Barton was also a venture partner at Benchmark, and is on the board of directors for Netflix, Avvo, Nextdoor, and Artsy. He serves on the Stanford University Board of Trustees.
The blue screen of death (BSoD), blue screen error, blue screen, fatal error, or bugcheck, and officially known as a stop error, is a critical error screen displayed by the Microsoft Windows and ReactOS operating systems in the event of a fatal system error. It indicates a system crash, in which the operating system has reached a critical condition where it can no longer operate safely.
Kevin R. Johnson is an American businessman and software engineer who was the president and chief executive officer (CEO) of Starbucks Coffee Company from 2017 to 2022. Succeeding Howard Schultz as CEO, Johnson previously was the company's president and chief operating officer from 2015 to 2017. On March 16, 2022, Johnson announced that he was stepping down as CEO, Schultz would take over as CEO in the interim. Johnson joined the board of directors of Goldman Sachs in late 2022.
Acumatica provides cloud and browser based enterprise resource planning software for small and medium-sized businesses. The company is headquartered in Kirkland, Washington, in the Seattle metropolitan area.
Sivaramakrishnan Somasegar is an Indian-American technology business executive in the Greater Seattle Area. He is a Managing Director at Madrona Venture Group, a venture capital firm based in Seattle. Somasegar joined Madrona in November 2015 after a 27-year career at Microsoft, where he most recently was corporate vice president of the developer division and overseeing the global distributed R&D centers at Microsoft.
Anthony J. Bates is a British born business leader. Bates is the former CEO of Growth at Social Capital. Previously, he held a number of technology based business roles including the former president of GoPro, and the former executive vice president of Microsoft responsible for business development, strategy and evangelism and former CEO of Skype.
Microsoft Surface is a series of touchscreen-based personal computers, tablets, and interactive whiteboards designed and developed by Microsoft, most of them running the Windows operating system. They are designed to be premium devices that set examples for manufacturers of other Windows-compatible products. It comprises several generations of hybrid tablets, 2-in-1 detachable notebooks, a convertible desktop all-in-one, an interactive whiteboard, and various accessories, many with unique form factors. The majority of devices in the Surface lineup are based on Intel processors and compatible with Windows 10 or Windows 11.
Satya Narayana Nadella is an Indian-American business executive. He is the executive chairman and CEO of Microsoft, succeeding Steve Ballmer in 2014 as CEO and John W. Thompson in 2021 as chairman. Before becoming CEO, he was the executive vice president of Microsoft's cloud and enterprise group, responsible for building and running the company's computing platforms.
The lawsuit Microsoft v. Internal Revenue Service, No. 1:14-cv-01982, was filed in U.S. District Court, District of Columbia when Microsoft sued the Internal Revenue Service requesting the IRS comply with a Freedom of Information Act request. According to Microsoft the IRS "unlawfully withheld" information on a contract between law firm Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan and the IRS. The IRS uses the services of the law firm to assess transfer pricing financial audits of Microsoft.
Crisis Text Line is a global nonprofit organization providing free and confidential text-based mental health support and crisis intervention by texting HOME to 741741. The organization launched in 2013, and its services are available 24 hours a day throughout the United States, Canada, UK, and Ireland. As of August 2023, the organization reported that it had supported over 8 million support conversations.
Snowflake Inc. is a cloud computing–based data cloud company based in Bozeman, Montana. It was founded in July 2012 and was publicly launched in October 2014 after two years in stealth mode.
Microsoft, a technology company historically known for its opposition to the open source software paradigm, turned to embrace the approach in the 2010s. From the 1970s through 2000s under CEOs Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, Microsoft viewed the community creation and sharing of communal code, later to be known as free and open source software, as a threat to its business, and both executives spoke negatively against it. In the 2010s, as the industry turned towards cloud, embedded, and mobile computing—technologies powered by open source advances—CEO Satya Nadella led Microsoft towards open source adoption although Microsoft's traditional Windows business continued to grow throughout this period generating revenues of 26.8 billion in the third quarter of 2018, while Microsoft's Azure cloud revenues nearly doubled.
COVID-19 datasets are public databases for sharing case data and medical information related to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Ballmer Group is an American investment company based in Bellevue, Washington that serves as a family office to manage the wealth of Steve Ballmer, the former CEO of Microsoft. The purpose of Ballmer Group is to help children especially ones born in poor families with economic mobility.