The People’s Council on Technology and the American Workforce PCTAW
Toward a Social Contract for Citizen Thriving
CITIZENS’ FOUNDING CHARTER
Established by Citizens of the United States, in the Spirit of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution
INTRODUCTORY NOTE
On March 23, 2026, the President of the United States announced the first members of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST). The Council’s stated mission is to advise on “the opportunities and challenges that emerging technologies present to the American workforce” and to ensure “all Americans thrive in the Golden Age of Innovation.”
The Council’s composition tells a different story. Of its thirteen members, twelve are current or former CEOs of major technology companies: Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, Jensen Huang of NVIDIA, Larry Ellison of Oracle, Marc Andreessen of Andreessen Horowitz, Sergey Brin of Alphabet, and others who collectively control the very AI systems whose workforce consequences the Council is charged with examining. A single university scientist — a physicist specializing in quantum computing — represents the entirety of independent academic expertise. No labor economist. No workers’ advocate. No community health researcher. No representative of the workers whose lives and livelihoods are most directly at stake.
When the builders of a technology are also its exclusive advisors to the government, the resulting policy will reflect their interests. This is not a critique of the individuals involved, many of whom are brilliant and some of whom have expressed genuine concern for workers. It is a structural observation: a council whose members profit from the acceleration of AI is not constitutionally equipped to govern its human consequences.
THE DEMOCRATIC GAP: The PCAST, as constituted, advises on how to build the technology faster. No equivalent body advises on what happens to the people whose work the technology transforms. That gap is not an oversight. It is a governance failure. And in a republic, governance failures are citizens’ problems to solve.
The People’s Council on Technology and the American Workforce is the citizens’ answer to that gap. It is not a government body. It derives its authority not from executive appointment but from the sovereign source that the Founders identified as the only legitimate foundation of democratic governance: the consent and active participation of the people themselves. It is founded in the conviction that when government fails to represent the full range of its citizens’ interests, citizens do not wait. They build the institutions they need.
This Charter establishes the People’s Council — its purpose, its principles, its structure, and its mandate. It is offered to the citizens of Montgomery County, Pennsylvania and to all Americans as a model of democratic self-organization in an age when the decisions that will shape the next generation are being made without the people’s voice at the table.
PREAMBLE
We the citizens of the United States — workers, parents, educators, healthcare professionals, community organizers, and neighbors — hereby establish the People’s Council on Technology and the American Workforce.
We act in the tradition of the Declaration of Independence, which holds that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed and that when institutions fail to secure the conditions for human flourishing, it is the right — and the responsibility — of the people to alter those institutions or to build new ones adequate to the challenge. We act in the tradition of the Constitution, which places the promotion of the general welfare among the foundational duties of democratic government. And we act in the tradition of every generation of Americans who, when confronted by transformations too large for individuals to navigate alone, organized collectively to shape the terms of the change.
The artificial intelligence transformation of work is such a transformation. It is not a future event. It is happening now — in the office parks of Montgomery County, in the healthcare facilities of Norristown, in the logistics centers of Pottstown, in the professional service firms of King of Prussia. The people living inside this transformation deserve a seat at the table where its consequences are examined and its governance is shaped. The People’s Council exists to give them that seat.
We are not anti-technology. We are pro-democracy. We understand that technological progress and human flourishing are not inherently antagonistic. We insist only that they are not automatically aligned — and that aligning them is precisely the work of democratic governance. When that work is not being done by institutions with the authority to do it, citizens must do it themselves: building the evidence, framing the choices, and demanding that those with authority act.
This Council proceeds from a single animating conviction: that citizens are not subjects of the AI transformation. They are its sovereign stakeholders — and sovereignty, in a republic, is exercised, not merely asserted.
The “Order” Establishing The People’s Council.
There is hereby established the People’s Council on Technology and the American Workforce (hereinafter, “the Council” or “PCTAW”).
The Council is a citizen body. It is not an agency of the federal government, not a creation of executive order, and not dependent on governmental appointment or authorization for its legitimacy. It derives its authority from the oldest and most fundamental source recognized by the American constitutional tradition: the sovereign will of the people, organized for the purpose of democratic deliberation and democratic demand.