Join Us

The rise of MAGA and fascism in America can only be stopped when an opposing political movement proves it can deliver real economic progress for the majority of Americans who have been left behind for most of the postwar era. Deindustrialization, the destruction of state capacity, the erosion of public services, and the skyrocketing costs of housing, health care, and every other essential have broken the foundational American promise that every generation will be better off than the last. That is the root of the American crisis, and no amount of political messaging will fix it without a plan to actually start making people's lives better again.

In January 2029, a new president will take office with a chance to do exactly that — and possibly facing something with no precedent in American economic history: AI-driven layoffs of a significant share of the professional and managerial class, with cascading effects that drive collateral job losses across the entire economy. They will need a plan. Not a collection of policy papers. A plan — comprehensive, actionable, and ready to execute on day one.

The Mission for America is that plan. Think of it as the progressive answer to Project 2025: a governing blueprint for a sweeping national mobilization to build a new, clean economy that actually provides prosperity for all Americans — not just the handful of prosperous metro areas where the modern economy happens to work, but the vast majority of the country that has been left behind.

We are looking for a Director to lead this project to completion, and to make it their own.

Most progressive think tanks produce policy proposals designed to be politically realistic — incremental steps that might survive a hostile Congress. That work matters, but it isn't what we do.

The Mission for America is a plan to go all the way: to do what is actually needed to get wages rising again, to create millions of well-paying jobs, to rebuild the homes, buildings, and infrastructure of the America that has been left behind. And it must do so on a timeline that matters politically — making the majority of Americans' lives noticeably and permanently better within the first term, with visible results before the midterms. This is a plan for a national mobilization on the scale of what the United States achieved in World War II — when the country proved that a democratic government can transform an entire economy in years, not decades.

This is not traditional policy work. It is closer to economic architecture — designing interlocking systems across 20+ sectors of the economy that together add up to a fundamentally different country. If you have spent your career in policy and have been frustrated by the smallness of what's considered possible, this is the job where you get to think at a completely different scale.

The Director leads a research team to complete the Mission for America. You will manage teams developing detailed plans across 20+ national missions covering different industries and sectors — energy, housing, transportation, manufacturing, care, agriculture, and more. Solutions must be fast, technically feasible, and capable of driving rapid transformation.

You will have significant latitude to shape the project's approach, methodology, and priorities. The mandate is clear: a plan for sweeping mobilization that goes far beyond what is currently being imagined in mainstream policy circles. How you get there is something you will determine in collaboration with the Executive Director and our advisors.

This role is designed to position you for senior policy leadership in the next administration. We are building the plan that the next president will need — and we expect the people who build it to be the ones called on to help implement it.

Experience that matters most:

• You've worked on policy inside government — in a presidential administration, on a congressional committee, or at a senior level in a federal agency. You know how things actually shake out in the scramble of governing, and you know what form a plan needs to take to survive contact with reality.
• You have a network that reaches into the ranks of the people likely to serve in the next administration and Congress — and ideally, you intend to be one of them.
• You've led teams and have strong management experience. You know how to hire well, set direction, and get ambitious work out of people.
• You can write — clearly, rigorously, and persuasively. This project produces documents that need to move busy, skeptical people to action.

This is a policy role, not a technology role. But our approach to research is not the usual one. We are not just asking ChatGPT questions. We are building our own AI agents — coding multi-agent, multi-step systems that research topics across dozens of sources, gather and structure data, synthesize findings, and handle the labor-intensive parts of producing rigorous written analysis. This is custom tooling, built by our team, for our specific research needs.

The purpose is to free us to do what only humans can do with other humans: conducting live interviews with the key players in industry, government, and science who hold the details that are not available on the internet or in print — and making the judgment calls about what will actually work.

The right candidate does not need to be a technologist. But you do need to be genuinely excited about working this way — and willing to learn the basics: working with GitHub, using command-line tools, writing simple scripts, and connecting to APIs. We will teach you. What we can't teach is the appetite to learn.

We are building this plan for a moment that may never come the way we imagine it. But we believe a window for transformative political leadership is opening in 2028, and when it opens, the leaders who step through it will need more than good intentions. They will need a detailed, credible, comprehensive blueprint for what to actually do. That blueprint does not exist today. We are building it.

The approach is modeled on proven historical precedent: the WWII-era mobilization that transformed the American economy in under five years, financed by institutions like the Reconstruction Finance Corporation. Piecemeal reform will not be sufficient for the converging crises of climate change, technological disruption, and democratic erosion. The response must be comprehensive and fast.

Skeptics — economists, journalists, political staffers — will tell you this is unrealistic. They said the same thing about Roosevelt's “impossible” WWII production targets, the New Deal, the Interstate Highway System, and the moon landing. If you are swayed by that kind of thinking, this is not the right role. If it makes you want to prove them wrong, we should talk.

Required reading: Bad Samaritans (Chang, 2007), Destructive Creation (Wilson, 2016), Unprecedented Power (Fenberg, 2011)