WHEN he was running Microsoft, Steve Ballmer was famous for his energy. In a legendary clip of a company meeting that has received almost a million hits on YouTube, he charges onto the stage and launches into his “monkey dance”, before roaring into a microphone: “I love this company!” Mr Ballmer stood down from the software giant in 2014 and has new outlets for his drive. One is the LA Clippers, a basketball team he bought for $2bn. The other could not be more different: a project to create a Form 10-K, a type of corporate report, for America’s dysfunctional government. That is more revolutionary than it sounds.

In most walks of life, 10-K denotes a long-distance run or a sum of money. In the investment world it refers to the report that American regulators force all listed companies to publish once a year. Investors have a near-religious reverence for 10-Ks. They are the global gold standard of corporate disclosure: 300 or so warts-and-all pages that contain a firm’s financial accounts and describe its objectives, conflicts of interests, governance, risks and flaws. Fund managers scour the documents to ensure that firms’ executives are not fibbing. Bosses study their competitors’ forms.

Mr Ballmer’s aim is for his 10-K on the government to contain everything citizens need to know “without hyperbole and without omission”, as he puts it. This may appear an eccentric ambition, but in an era of fake news and partisan division many Americans have shown themselves to be hungry for objective information. Mr Ballmer published the nation’s first 10-K on a new website, USAfacts.org, that was launched on April 18th. It is already wildly popular, receiving 2.6m page views on its first day.

Treating the government like a company has obvious limitations. Firms exist to maximise profits within the law. The job of governments is to maximise the overall welfare of citizens within financial constraints. Governments can tax, and print money, so they can borrow far more. Companies’ governance is child’s play compared with running a nation. The government faces many more risks than firms do. Pages 51-54 of the new national 10-K list as dangers riots, war with a powerful adversary and also the fact that “human behaviour cannot be fully regulated or controlled”.

Yet there are benefits to looking at Leviathan as you would a firm. A 10-K requires that all activities are “consolidated” together in one place, whereas the government issues millions of documents—GDP accounts, budget documents, crime reports—that rarely cohere and are often gibberish to voters. Mr Ballmer’s 10-K aggregates every branch of the state, from Alaska’s local governments to the Federal Reserve. It splits the total into four operating divisions, based on the constitution. Each division has its own finances and key performance indicators, as at a company.

The numbers show that, as you might expect, the government is hugely complex, with about 100,000 bodies. Its $5trn of revenues are 11 times greater than Walmart’s, the world’s biggest firm by sales. The state’s main costs are transfer payments, such as welfare and wages for government employees. Viewed as a firm it has a profit margin of minus 3%, compared with 8% for the aggregate of firms in the S&P 500 index. Even leaving aside education, it invests more in the future than firms. R&D and capital expenditures together take up 12% of revenue, compared with 8% for the S&P 500. But its debts are a whopping 289% of sales (tax revenues) versus 77% for the S&P 500.

An investor considering Leviathan Inc would certainly look askance at its record. Performance over the past decade has been “a mixture of stagnation, progression towards, and retreat from, achievement of our constitutional objectives”, says the 10-K. And its prospects are dim. As Social Security and health-care costs rise, the deficit and debt levels will deteriorate, even threatening the government’s status as a going concern by around 2046.

Governance is poor. The country is not managed using a coherent taxonomy. So, for example, the House of Representatives, the Senate and the White House each split the job of running America into roughly 20 operating divisions. But their categories are different, meaning crossed wires and insufficient accountability. Investors detest firms with “related-party transactions”, in which executives receive money from customers, the firm or counterparties on top of their compensation package. Page 152 of Leviathan Inc’s 10-K reveals a troublingly high level of such related-party transactions in the form of political funding (much from cash-rich companies as well as from individual donors).

I love this country

The idea that charismatic businesspeople can save the government from itself is a recurring theme in American politics. In 1909 Franklin MacVeagh, the treasury secretary, promised to run the government on a business basis. Ross Perot, a businessman, ran for president twice using the same logic. Donald Trump is the latest adherent to this view. He has filled his cabinet with swaggering tycoons, such as Wilbur Ross, the commerce secretary, hoping they can knock heads together harder than career politicians can.

Economists and policy wonks tend to dismiss the idea that government can learn much from business. That seems odd. Certainly, boardroom bravado is not the answer to America’s problems. But Mr Ballmer draws on a business tradition different from that of Mr Trump—its habit of clever, rational analysis.

A curious fact about America is that, while its government has gradually slid into gridlock and ill-repute, its companies have become more globally dominant than at any point, probably, in history. Of the world’s 20 most-valuable firms, 14 are American (including, still, Microsoft). They are ruthlessly effective about meeting their objectives of greater market power and profits. If you want to find a reliance on facts, cold rationality and coherent, purposeful organisation in America, look to its firms rather than to its media or its politicians. The 10-K will appear every year. It should be read widely.