Project 2026
A Moonshot Press Initiative · America's 250th Year
Renewing America's democratic promise for its third century.
Project 2026 is Moonshot Press's flagship civic-renewal initiative.
It brings together Moonshot Press journalism, public learning, People's Commissions, the Citizen Toolbox, the Citizen Lab, and local demonstration work around a shared purpose: helping citizens strengthen democracy, expand opportunity, and practice active citizenship.
In 2026, the United States marks 250 years since the Declaration of Independence announced a bold proposition: that all people are created equal and possess rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Through Project 2026, Moonshot Press asks what it would mean to make that promise more real—not only for an anniversary, but for the 250 years that follow.
What do we owe each other—and the next generation—if America's democratic promise is to become more real?
Project 2026 is not a political campaign or a party platform. It is an invitation to citizens to understand the challenges before us, deliberate across differences, and help build more capable, accountable, and flourishing communities.
The founding promise
Life. Liberty. The pursuit of happiness.
The Declaration describes a direction, not a finished country.
Life requires the conditions that sustain health, security, and human development.
Liberty requires more than formal rights. It requires trustworthy information, meaningful participation, and the ability to influence the decisions that shape one's life.
The pursuit of happiness means the opportunity to build a life of purpose, relationship, contribution, and agency.
Project 2026 begins with the distance between this promise and the realities many Americans experience. It does not exist merely to describe the gap. It exists to help citizens understand it, deliberate about it, and work together to close it.
Three commitments
Democracy
Citizens should be able to understand and help shape the public decisions that affect their lives.
Opportunity
Every person should have a genuine opportunity to develop health, capability, security, purpose, and contribution.
Citizenship
People are not spectators of public life. They are its authors.
These commitments guide every Project 2026 inquiry, tool, and local demonstration.
How Project 2026 works
Project 2026 brings together the full Moonshot Press civic pathway.
Understand → Deliberate → Act
Understand Use journalism, Citizen Briefs, case presentations, evidence, and public-learning resources to make complex problems more comprehensible.
Deliberate Bring citizens, lived experience, expertise, competing perspectives, values, and tradeoffs into serious public inquiry.
Act Develop practical tools, public questions, action guides, accountability resources, and community partnerships that help people take a meaningful next step.
Learn and share Follow what happens, measure what can be learned, correct mistakes, and return those lessons to the public.
[Explore Understand] [Explore Deliberate] [Explore Act]
Current public inquiries
Five questions for America's third century.
How can Americans move from contempt to connection?
Political disagreement is not the same as contempt: the belief that someone across a divide is not simply wrong, but beneath respect.
Building Arks, Weaving Bridges: A Journey from Contempt to Connection explores the inner and civic practices that can help people remain grounded, listen across difference, rebuild trust, and sustain a shared democratic life.
[Explore Building Arks, Weaving Bridges]
How do we protect and advance America's constitutional principles?
The Declaration named the promise. The Constitution created an architecture for liberty, conflict, representation, and accountable power.
The Declaration to Constitution Project explores that architecture, the pressures it faces, and the responsibilities citizens inherit in protecting and renewing it.
[Explore the Declaration to Constitution Project]
Who gets to shape the AI future?
Artificial intelligence is moving from a specialized technology into the arrangements of everyday life, while the people whose work, families, and futures are being changed have little organized voice in deciding the terms of that change.
The Technology Commission is a citizen-led public inquiry working through what a new social contract looks like for an AI-disrupted economy, beginning with its first focused question: work, dignity, and the AI transition.
[Explore the Technology Commission]
What do we owe the next generation?
The First 1,000 Days of Life—from conception through age two—are foundational to health, learning, relationships, and lifelong opportunity.
This inquiry asks what children and families should be able to count on, and how citizens, communities, and public institutions can help create those conditions.
[Explore the First 1,000 Days Initiative] [Explore the First 1,000 Days Commission]
How can America build a health-promoting system?
The United States spends more on health care than any other nation, yet too often organizes its systems around illness after it occurs rather than the conditions that create health.
Civic Grand Rounds on American Health Care examines what it would take to build a system that supports health, dignity, family agency, prevention, and human flourishing.
[Explore Civic Grand Rounds]
Local learning, national relevance
Thrive in Montco PA
Project 2026 is tested first with real neighbors in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania.
Thrive in Montco PA is not presented as a model that can simply be imposed elsewhere. It is a local civic demonstration: a place to test whether public learning, citizen deliberation, practical tools, and community knowledge can help people understand challenges and build more responsive local systems.
Local experience can challenge national assumptions. National evidence can support local action.
[Explore Thrive in Montco PA]
The Moonshot Class of 2026
A generational test.
Public questions can become abstract. The Moonshot Class brings them back to the children who will live with the consequences of decisions adults make today.
The National Moonshot Class of 2026 uses five composite child profiles to illuminate different American realities. The Montco PA Moonshot Class makes the question concrete within a particular community.
Every Project 2026 inquiry should be tested against a simple question:
Does this strengthen the conditions in which the next generation can flourish?
[Meet the Moonshot Class]
A public experiment
Project 2026 is a work in progress.
It does not claim that citizens alone can solve every public problem, or that one organization holds the answers. It begins with a more modest and more demanding proposition: public life improves when citizens have clearer information, stronger relationships, practical tools, meaningful ways to participate, and institutions willing to show what they have done.
Moonshot Press will distinguish evidence from inference, present serious competing arguments, acknowledge uncertainty, correct errors publicly, and disclose the use of artificial intelligence in its work.
[How Moonshot Press Works] [How We Use AI]
Join the work
America's democratic promise is not self-executing.
It depends on citizens willing to learn, deliberate, act, and remain responsible for one another.
There is a place to begin wherever you are: read an article, bring a question, join a public conversation, use a civic tool, contribute experience, or help bring the work into your community.
[Read Project 2026 on Moonshot Press] [Connect with Moonshot Press] [Subscribe to Moonshot Press]