USAFacts, the non-for-profit that aims to make government data more available, and understandable, to everyday Americans, is looking for a new leader who can help usher it into the AI age.
Poppy MacDonald, who has been the not-for-profit’s president since 2018, will be stepping down on June 27. Steve Ballmer, the founder of USAFacts and former Microsoft CEO, will be stepping in in the interim, and hopes to fill role by the end of the year (or sooner).
In her seven year tenure, MacDonald oversaw the growth of the not-for-profit’s reach, including to 640,000 newsletter subscribers, 65-plus million view on its “Just the Facts” video series—which explained things like how the government categorizes immigrants to how taxes fund the government—and more than 16 million monthly website visitors. It also released a massive report and data skills course for lawmakers; published more than 900 nonpartisan articles with data insights on topics like immigration, crime, and the economy; and, yes, began integrating AI analysis to respond to hyper-specific reader questions.
But going forward, USAFacts needs to focus on both speed and user experience, Ballmer says, in order to pull information from more than 90,000 government sources and help people apply all that data to their lives. “How do you build AI style bot interactivity with our content?” Ballmer says. “There’s a ton of government data. We don’t have it all up there, if you will, in an accessible form. Can we use modern technology to move data into an accessible form at a faster rate? How will we work with the general purpose chatbots—chat GPT, Microsoft, CoPilot, et cetera?”
What USA Facts is looking for in a leader
That means the next USAFacts president will have to have some technical skills—but they also need to understand marketing and media in order to create new types of content and reach a bigger audience. (MacDonald herself came from a media background; she was previously the president of Politico). “Do we have our content in enough forms, and the right forms, so that we can go from 16 million to 100 million visitors a year?” Ballmer says.
That may sound lofty, but there are more than 250 million Americans of voting age—and Ballmer says a “broad swath” of Americans are interested in the topics USAFacts provides data for. The USAFacts president should be able to empower them to apply federal data to their everyday questions. “How might I use the information if, you know, I’m shopping for a house. ‘Let me understand my neighborhood.’ Or, on the flip side, ‘this is the state of affairs, how do I want to express myself to my elected representatives?’” he says.
That’s a challenge at a time when many Americans lack a basic understanding of civics. A 2023 study found that one in six Americans couldn’t name any of the three branches of government (two-thirds of Americans could name all three). Pew research from that same year found that fewer than half of Americans knew the length of a full term of office for a senator, or who chooses the president if there’s an Electoral College tie. The rampage waged on federal offices by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has also highlighted how little Americans know about what federal workers actually do.
All that focuses on the role of the federal government, but local governments actually play an even bigger role in most Americans’ everyday lives, Ballmer notes—and that’s where those 90,000 sources of data come into play.
“So the [next] leader then has to be able to be smart about being open about working with engineers and envisioning where AI takes us,” Ballmer says. But they also have to “have enough of that media flavor to understand how people want to consume information,” along with an “incredible marketing gene.”
USAFacts and the role of AI
USAFacts has already experimented with AI. Ahead of the 2024 election, it unveiled a general AI-powered analysis engine that helped it take information from government sources like the Census Bureau or the Labor Department and use it to respond to ultra-niche reader questions.
If someone Googled, “How many immigrants are in [my state]?” or “What is the unemployment rate in [my county]?”, they would have found a direct answer from USAFacts (which was often featured in Google’s AI overview and as the first search result).
But looking ahead, USAFacts wants to make this sort of AI response into more of a back and forth, allowing users to ask follow-up questions and have more of a back-and-forth conversation. There’s a few challenges there: current generative AI chatbots continue to hallucinate information, generating answers that just aren’t based in fact. That’s an issue for a company focused on disseminating facts.
USAFacts also touts itself as a nonpartisan organization; it has worked with politicians across the aisle and has emphasized its objectivity. “We have to present real government data as it is. We can’t be interpreting it. We can’t be showing the wrong data,” Ballmer says. “So how do we take the core [LLM] technology, derive the benefit, without taking some of those risks?” For USAFacts, that may look like a custom built chatbot; they wouldn’t, for example, use a service that searches the open internet for government data; it would need to search only a specific database.
The not-for-profit’s use of AI so far, by creating structured answer pages, has allowed for a human to be in the loop to ensure that trusted data is delivered to answer a user question, MacDonald notes. “But what [Ballmer] really envisions for the future is that an American can come on to our site and search anything they want in an unstructured way, ask a question in natural human language, the question that is on their mind, and start interacting and getting that trusted data back,” she says. “You can’t really have a human in the loop in that process, right? And so it really relies on the technology.”
A Changing landscape
The decision to bring in a new leader to guide USAFacts into this AI future was a mutual one, the not-for-profit says. MacDonald and Ballmer have been discussing the leadership change for about six months—and as Ballmer knows from his time running Microsoft, there are “better and worse” times for organizations to make a leadership transition. “We’re at a juncture point,” he says.
“USAFacts is in a really strong position coming out of the election,” MacDonald adds. “There’s momentum in terms of our AI efforts and how we can use that to scale the data that we can collect and clean and contextualize, but also the content that we can produce out of it and how personal and relevant it can be. And it just felt like a great new time to bring in a new leader with new experiences and new knowledge to bear.”
MacDonald has helmed USAFacts for seven years, the longest she’s ever been at an organization. With her youngest child heading to college in the fall, MacDonald is going to take the summer to spend time with her family before thinking about what’s next for her career.
Ballmer says MacDonald has left “big shoes to fill” for the next USAFacts president. The changing American landscape adds to that challenge. The Trump Administration has decimated government data collection. Trump ordered the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association to stop tracking the cost of extreme weather and climate disasters, and has also hampered the ability of the National Weather Service to even collect climate and weather data, which undergird forecasts. He has also purged federal data sets and webpages on everything from crime to education to health, and even taken steps to dismantle entire agencies, like the Department of Education.
These situations have gotten Americans a bit more engaged with the facts, and provide an opportunity for what the not-for-profit can do going forward. “As people are hearing, ‘hey, the Department of Education might close,’ I think they took it for granted that there’s just always going to be a Department of Education,” MacDonald says.
“And now they’re curious—what does the Department of Education do? What does it fund? How would that impact my local school? And so we’re seeing an appetite from consumers who want this information, and that is a really exciting opportunity for how USAFacts can provide value, but also for our future growth trajectory.”
USAFacts does not collect data itself; it simply publishes it from government sources. That means it needs government sources to keep existing. And though its nonpartisan, it will fight for those facts: “If we think that there’s some important set of data that’s going away, we’ll make the case for it,” Ballmer says. He actually tweeted at current Education Secretary Linda McMahon back in April, urging for the continuation of the National Center for Education Statistics.The future of U.S. education is “on the line” he said, and “without solid data, we can’t measure what’s working.”
But USAFacts’s main purpose, he says—and a big challenge for its next leader—is keeping Americans interested in data at all. “Unless we get more Americans to look at data,” he says, “it won’t matter how much we have.”
