The organization ceased to operate in 2009 and the majority of its staff and programs moved to the Partnership for Public Service.
[1] Originally, the Council was a brainchild of several ex-government officials who had moved on to success in the private sector.
The Council was non-partisan in nature, and had former Presidents Jimmy Carter, George H. W. Bush, and Bill Clinton as honorary chairs of its board.
Virginia philanthropist Alan Voorhees, whose architectural firm designed the Metro system in Washington, D.C., and many other capital cities around the world in the 1960s and 1970s, provided seed money and office space in the early 1980s.
Voorhees was always interested in applications of technology to public problems, and was the inventor of the "gravity theory" of traffic flow which was used in transportation planning since the 1950s.