In this paper we ask whether the US government should replace its current discounting practices with a declining discount rate schedule, as the United Kingdom and France have done, or continue to discount the future at a constant exponential rate. To address the question, we briefly present the theoretical basis for a declining discount rate (DDR) schedule, and focus on how, in practice, a DDR could be estimated for use by policy analysts. We discuss the empirical approaches in the literature and review how the United Kingdom and France estimated their DDR schedules.