The Academy's crosspartisan report, Our Common Purpose, included 31 recommendations for strengthening democracy. The very first recommendation was to enlarge the House of Representatives. This was the rationale:
"When the framers of the Constitution designed the House of Representatives, they set a constitutional cap of 30,000 constituents per representative. With population growth, the House grew from 65 to 435 members in 1929, when Congress capped its size. With further population growth, the average Congressperson now represents over 747,000 constituents. Repealing the 1929 Permanent Apportionment Act and expanding the House will tighten the link between representatives and their constituencies and make the House more representative of the nation."
A desire to explore the idea further, and examine the implications and implementation, led to an ongoing initiative that issued a publication, The Case for Enlarging the House of Representatives.
An explainer video about the idea developed by, titled The House of Representatives is too small. Here is one way to fix it., features a co-author of the report, Lee Drutman, and cites the report as a source for additional information. The video was released in early February 2026 and had more than 550,000 views within its first weeks online.
“The number of which the House of Representatives is to consist, forms another and a very interesting point of view. . . . Scarce any article, indeed, in the whole Constitution seems to be rendered more worthy of attention, by the weight of character and the apparent force of argument with which it has been assailed. . . . No political problem is less susceptible of a precise solution than that which relates to the number most convenient for a representative legislature.”
—James Madison, The Federalist, No. 55