Government and Social Restructuring Project

Can a society redesign its own systems —
on purpose?

The GSRP is a sustained national effort to give citizens — across background, ideology, and lived experience — the structure, support, and time to produce serious, credible responses to the challenges American institutions now face. Nothing like it has existed before in American civic life. The challenges that make it necessary are new. So is the attempt.

Learn how it works View the pilot program
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What is the GSRP?

Most large-scale reform efforts fall into one of two categories — and both have well-documented failure modes.

Expert-driven
Rigorous, but disconnected. Produces sophisticated analysis and technically sound proposals. Rarely produces democratic legitimacy or durable public support.
Public engagement
Inclusive, but unable to go deep. Surfaces public values and priorities. Rarely produces the analytical complexity that serious institutional redesign requires.
GSRP
Designed to bridge that gap. Structured deliberative process. Diverse participants supported with evidence, expert engagement, and enough time to go beyond the obvious.

The goal is not consensus for its own sake. The goal is credible, evidence-grounded outcomes — produced by people who do not already agree.

This has been tried — at smaller scales — and it works.
Ireland's Citizens' Assembly deliberated on questions the political system had declared intractable — including abortion rights and same-sex marriage — and produced recommendations that were subsequently adopted by national referendum. Similar processes have produced significant results in Belgium, France, Canada, and the United States. The GSRP extends what the evidence has already established: that structured deliberation, with diverse participants and balanced information, produces outcomes that the normal political environment cannot.
100+
Deliberative polling experiments across 30 countries demonstrating that diverse, polarized groups reason differently — and better — in structured deliberative settings
25
Primary domains of American institutional and social life examined — from governance and economy to housing, healthcare, the carceral system, and more
10–15
Year operating horizon — long enough to do this work with the depth it requires, short enough to remain connected to the urgency that motivated it
What actually happens

Inside a working group

Participants work in structured groups focused on specific areas of American life — housing, civic participation, the care economy, the carceral system, and twenty-two more. Within those groups, the process moves through four movements, each building on the last.

1
Grounding
Establishing shared factual foundation from evidence and initial expert engagement
2
Investigation
Deep engagement with contested questions, structural tensions, and gaps in the evidence
3
Synthesis
Integration of experiential, analytical, and emergent knowledge into coherent positions
4
Translation
Connecting conclusions to the ecosystem of pathways through which outputs can produce change
Within each group, participants
  • Examine how current systems actually function — and why they produce the outcomes they do
  • Engage with researchers through structured inquiry sessions — and educate those researchers in return
  • Identify structural tensions and genuine tradeoffs, not just symptoms
  • Develop positions grounded in evidence, with minority views documented alongside majority ones
Participants are employed, not volunteered
  • Paid competitive wages — participation is their job, not something fitted around it
  • Full benefits: housing, healthcare, childcare, transportation, mental health support
  • No credential requirements — the project is designed around experiential knowledge, not professional credentials
  • Cohorts rotate over 3–6 months, continuously bringing fresh perspectives into the process
Starting with a real-world test

The pilot program

The GSRP does not launch at full scale. It begins with two simultaneous regional pilots — each covering a single primary domain in a distinct geographic region — designed to answer a bounded set of questions before the full project commits its resources.

Can this process produce credible, evidence-grounded outputs — with genuinely diverse participants, in real-world conditions?

2 Simultaneous sites
18–24 Month timeline
Independent Evaluation

The pilots are explicitly designed to surface what doesn't work — not to demonstrate that everything does. A "not ready to scale" finding is a legitimate and valuable outcome. It is the pilot phase doing its job.

What the pilots test
Recruitment and retention
Can the employment model attract and sustain the participant diversity the project requires — across economic background, geography, ideology, and lived experience?
What the pilots test
Deliberative process quality
Does the deliberative design — the small-group structure, facilitation protocols, expert engagement model — produce the depth of reasoning the project claims it will?
What the pilots test
Nonpartisanship under real conditions
Can the project's nonpartisanship architecture hold when participants have genuine political commitments and when the material under examination is genuinely contested?
What the pilots cannot test
National representativeness or full-scale integration
Two regional pilots cannot validate national representativeness, cross-domain integration, or the deliberative depth that emerges over years. The project is honest about this from the outset.
Why this exists

The United States has invested heavily in science, technology, and defense. It has invested far less in the deliberate design of its own institutions. As a result, many of the systems that structure daily life — governance, housing, healthcare, the information environment — struggle to adapt to the challenges they now face.

This is not because the problems are unsolvable. It is because the country has never built the deliberative infrastructure that serious, sustained institutional redesign requires. The GSRP is an attempt to build it.

The question this project is built around
Can people who do not already agree work together
to design systems that actually function?
If yes
It opens a new path for how societies respond to large-scale structural challenges — one grounded in evidence, democratic legitimacy, and the kind of sustained civic reasoning the current system cannot produce.
If no
That is equally important to understand. A project designed to learn — including from its own failures — produces knowledge that a project designed to demonstrate success cannot.
See the pilot in detail Explore how it works
Government and Social Restructuring Project
Pre-institutional phase — not yet publicly launched — working draft
GSRP