Building Consensus: Starting with Experts’ Insights to Help Shape Our Future

On December 3rd, the Brookings Institution and American Enterprise Institute (AEI) co-hosted an event to discuss a report commissioned by the Center for Collaborative Democracy (CCD) and written by 13 top former federal officials and think tank leaders. The report was designed to launch the Grand Bargain Project, which is building a national movement around a common-sense plan to advance six objectives: boosting economic mobility, reforming education, improving healthcare while reducing costs, transitioning to cleaner energy, curbing the national debt, and simplifying the tax code. 

At the Brookings-AEi event, the report’s authors and other policy experts discussed the report’s contents: practical ways to address these six challenges. The event underscored how experts who sharply disagree on ideology can reach consensus on a combination of reforms that would benefit all sectors of society. 

The Grand Bargain Project has built on the report by engaging citizens, stakeholders, and policymakers, to work out of a combination of reforms that can win the widest possible public support,  The latest combination is on the project website. The project is inviting wide  public participation with tools like the soon-to-be-released Grand Bargain Deliberation Guide and the currently available Polis survey tool. Both allow citizens to contribute their ideas, so that the framework will represent the will of the American people.

The Grand Bargain Project is in effect an invitation to all to transcend partisan divides by helping to shape the future of our country through practical, collaborative efforts.