WASHINGTON—Insisting the measure would “modernize the nation’s cognitive bandwidth and restore momentum to the concept of momentum,” federal officials on Thursday unveiled a sweeping effort to redirect public focus away from an accumulation of previous efforts, many of which are reportedly still technically occurring somewhere.
The plan, formally titled the National Attention Reallocation Framework, or NARF, establishes a cross-agency Office of Narrative Continuity and Fresh Starts that will issue weekly talking points designed to supersede earlier weekly talking points. A companion Distraction Deployment Kit, shipped to every department with a bold new logo and a set of easily memorizable verbs, will help press secretaries pivot from questions about prior initiatives to exciting updates on this one.
“We remain absolutely committed to the unfinished business of moving on,” said Deputy Director for Strategic Dazzling Marissa Coates, standing before a lectern emblazoned with the slogan Still Looking Ahead. “Americans deserve leadership that is as relentless about new beginnings as it is about not revisiting the past, which is why we are investing in the future of investing in the future.”
Coates, who previously headed the Task Force on Task Forces, said the new framework consolidates three existing entities—the Office of Unfinished Business, the Commission on Future Plans, and the Bureau of Oversight About Oversight—into a single agency with an easier name and more confident color palette. “We’ve learned that the public responds to decisive hues,” she added. “Teal wasn’t cutting it.”
According to internal briefing materials, NARF is built on a groundbreaking science known as applied recalibration. Analysts at the Department of Temporal Priorities have concluded that the average half-life of a domestic initiative is now 2.4 news cycles, down from 3.7 during the previous administration and 6.1 in the era before everyone had phones. To keep pace, the government will begin retiring the memory of an initiative 48 hours after announcing it, with transition documents sent to an unspecified archive, a folder labeled archive-final-final-v3, and a shoebox.
“The data are very clear,” said Dr. Emil Vargas, a media psychologist consulted for the rollout. “In our trials, simply saying ‘phase two’ increased public satisfaction by 41 percent, regardless of whether phase one existed. When we added a countdown clock and an animated eagle, satisfaction surged to 83 percent and participants forgot what question they’d been asked.”
Officials emphasized that NARF is not merely a rebranding effort, but a holistic ecosystem of distraction supports. There will be matching grants to states that rename older programs “Season 2,” a tax credit for contractors who pivot professionally, and a mobile app, LookOverThere.gov, that will push emergency novelty alerts whenever attention risks drifting toward outcomes.
“Our Distraction Dashboard gives real-time updates on what Americans are thinking about instead of deliverables,” said Seth Alston, NARF’s Chief Data Officer, gesturing to a screen displaying a wave of trending bubbles labeled New Logo, Ribbon-Cutting Soon, and What’s That Over There? “If a legacy initiative gets traction, we can surge fresh acronyms within minutes. In beta, we reduced recall of the 2019 Infrastructure Conversation by 98 percent just by releasing the National Unifying Strategy System, or NUSS, whose mission remains unclear.”
In a nod to transparency, the administration also released a 138-page guidance document explaining how agencies should “sunset, moonlight, or stagecraft” previous efforts. The document featured four pages of best practices, a QR code to a soothing playlist, and an appendix of sample answers to hard questions. Recommended phrases include “We’re not looking backward, we’re leaning into the horizon,” “I’m so glad you asked about outcomes; let me talk about a framework,” and “What if, instead of accountability, we discussed accessibility to hope?”
“Hope is a metric we track,” confirmed Coates. “It’s up 11 points since we started asking about it in a more optimistic tone.”
While members of both parties commended the government for finally tackling the nation’s backlog of initiatives that are still technically in progress, some expressed concern that the move might create a backlog of backlogs. “We can’t just kick the can down the road and then release a glossy brochure about kicking cans down roads,” said Rep. Allen Sherwood, who proposed a bipartisan amendment requiring two new initiatives for every old initiative displaced. “We need a roadmap for can-kicking that people can forget about responsibly.”
Watchdogs were similarly circumspect. “We’ve reached a dangerous inflection point where the meta-initiative has eaten the initiative,” warned Lila Brendt, director of the Institute for Applied Memory. “By Q4, we’re on track to be forgetting to forget, which is both unsustainable and weirdly efficient.”
In pilot tests conducted in three mid-sized media markets, NARF achieved what evaluators termed the “talking about the talking” benchmark within 19 minutes of launch. Focus groups later struggled to name any programs older than 72 hours and repeatedly referred to 2022 as “a season finale with a cliffhanger.” When shown footage of the 2021 Framework For Frameworks announcement, one participant asked if it was a parody, then became tearful and apologized to the eagle.
NARF’s private-sector partners—among them ClickDynamics, Prometheus Synergies, and a startup that gamifies eye contact—will deploy “attention nudges” to ensure Americans stay engaged with tomorrow’s priorities. These nudges include limited-edition hats, opt-out confetti, and a series of tastefully produced explainer videos in which actors playing mid-level officials explain how they “feel seen by the process.” Early analytics suggest a 600 percent rise in viewers who believe something is happening in general.
To boost visibility, the program’s official ribbon-cutting will feature a new kind of ribbon shaped like a QR code. Scanning it opens a landing page with a single button labeled “Continue.” The button does not function.
Responding to a reporter’s question about the status of last year’s Supply Chain Stabilization Acceleration Sprint, Coates smiled and invited the press to a separate media availability later this month dedicated to “reflecting on our journey forward.” That availability has been scheduled for 3:14 a.m. on a Monday and will be conducted in a room with gentle fog.
“This is about meeting people where they are—which is the middle of a pivot,” said NARF Senior Adviser Jonah Price. “We’re not abolishing anything. We’re just making sure that when Americans look at the national mantelpiece, they see today’s fruit bowl instead of yesterday’s commemorative plate.”
As the briefing wound down, staff distributed glossy pamphlets with the headline What’s Next Starts Now and a timeline of prior innovations, including 2018’s Plan To Announce Plans, 2019’s Operation Agenda Sprint Sprint, 2020’s War On Vague, and 2021’s Framework For Frameworks Phase One: Principles. Phase Two was listed as “see Phase One,” with an arrow circling back on itself.
Reached for comment, an ordinary citizen named Tasha Delgado said she dimly remembered being very excited about a Workforce Resilience Booster roughly a year ago but could not recall whether it affected her job. “There was a commercial where everyone was walking briskly,” she said. “I felt included.”
Outside experts say NARF may face its first test as soon as the next committee hearing, when members are likely to request detailed updates on programs displaced by the initiative designed to stop them from doing that. “The success metric for NARF is whether we end up discussing how we talk about discussing how we avoid discussions,” said Dr. Vargas. “I’m optimistic. The font choices alone are extremely persuasive.”
At press time, officials celebrated strong early indicators: a 74 percent increase in the phrase “turning the page,” a 9-point bump in self-reported “generally good vibes,” and a 0.00 percent change in measurable outcomes, which staff stressed would be addressed in a forthcoming initiative to contextualize results.
In a final flourish, Coates teased a limited-series follow-up—the Initiative Awareness Initiative—that will better explain the need for NARF while simultaneously previewing a sequel. “We want to be clear about one thing,” she said. “No one is more focused than we are on ensuring that Americans never have to think about this ever again.”
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