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Launched in July 2026, the American Opportunity Project (AOP) is a joint initiative of the Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC) and the National Governors Association (NGA) to develop bipartisan policy options addressing three national challenges: federal debt, AI-driven economic disruption, and a fragile social safety net.
The initiative brings together current and former governors, federal policymakers, business leaders, and local stakeholders. The goal is for these policy options to be promoted prior to the 2028 election cycle, with a briefing to the incoming presidential administration and new Congress in 2029.
The AOP is organized around four working groups, each applying a modeling and scoring framework to evaluate fiscal and economic impacts:
A steering committee is leading these working groups and evaluate findings.
A defining feature of the AOP is its positioning of governors as front-line problem solvers. States are framed as laboratories of innovation. The AOP will surface state-level challenges and successful approaches that can be scaled for national action.
The American Opportunity Project builds on BPC's Commission on the American Workforce, launched in late 2024, which developed a national bipartisan strategy to strengthen the workforce, expand economic opportunity, and ensure U.S. competitiveness. The commission produced A Nation at Risk to A Nation at Work: The Case for a National Talent Strategy, released in March 2026. Its four workgroups on K-12 education, postsecondary pathways, workforce, and worker supports inform the AOP's Workforce of the Future working group.
The AOP widens that scope to encompass the full fiscal and economic picture, connecting workforce challenges to the broader sustainability of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.
The initiative was formally announced at the 2026 NGA Summer Meeting in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
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