For more than a century, the United States has invested heavily in science, technology, and defense. The results are visible everywhere: aerospace, computing, biomedicine, artificial intelligence, military capability that has no peer. Since World War II, the Department of Defense alone has spent several trillion dollars on research, development, testing, and evaluation. In FY 2022, that figure reached nearly $116 billion — more than 41% of all federal R&D spending in a single year.
We know how to invest in the things we decide matter.
What we have never invested in — not seriously, not at scale, not with anything approaching the same intention — is the deliberate design of the systems that govern how we actually live. Less than two percent of all federal R&D spending over the last 75 years has gone to the social sciences. Of that, only a fraction has touched democratic innovation, institutional design, or civic systems.
The consequence isn't simply that we've preserved old systems past their useful life. It's something more disorienting than that. In the absence of intentional design, we don't stand still — we drift. We accumulate. Layers of conflicting regulation, siloed institutions, obsolete laws held together with procedural patch tape, analog processes with digital infrastructure bolted on. No one fully understands the whole of it. Few feel that it serves them.
It is not a society anyone consciously chose. It is a system we fell into — by default, by accumulation, by the compounding of decisions that were never coordinated with each other and never evaluated against any shared idea of what we were trying to achieve.
The Government and Social Restructuring Project emerged from roughly a decade of thinking across disciplines — politics, history, economics, social theory, anthropology, institutional design — and from a disposition toward deconstruction: taking systems apart to understand why they produce the outcomes they do, and whether they could be built differently.
The conclusion that kept surfacing, across every domain and every analytical frame, was the same: piecemeal fixes, applied at every level of government with almost no coordination and no shared framework, are not going to produce the society and the governance that the current moment requires. The problems are structural. The responses have been symptomatic. And the gap between those two things has been widening for a long time.
"What prompted this project wasn't a single insight. It was the absence of something. The deliberative democracy evidence base already exists. The urgency is visible to anyone paying attention. What didn't exist was a sustained, scaled, multi-domain effort to connect them.The GSRP is an attempt to build that.
The GSRP is currently in its pre-institutional phase. There is no legal entity yet, no staff, no funding. What exists is a fully developed founding architecture — the deliberate design work that precedes institution-building — and a small number of people who understand what this is and why it matters.
That is, by design, where something like this should begin.