kick the can down the road

present singular third person kicks the can down the road · participle present kicking the can down the road · participle past kicked the can down the road · past kicked the can down the road

1. idiomaticinformalTo avoid or postpone a decision or action; to procrastinate.

   To continue haggling over points on which a consensus seems impossible, Lehman said, is to "just keep kicking the can down the road."

   1983 April 10, Jeff Nesmith, Andrew Alexander, “Will End to MX Stalemate Provide Long-Term Solution?”, in The Post, volume l, number 15, West Palm Beach, FL, page A10

   5 more examples

   Ronald Lehman, deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategic and theater nuclear bombs, said the United States was satisfied with its land-based deterrent for many years and "there was a tendency to kick the can down the road and not pay enough attention to its problems.

   1983 April 5, “Will MX Succeed This Time?”, in Bennington Banner, Bennington, VT, page 8

   [R]eaching an alliance-wide consensus on them will be difficult. […] The natural temptation is to cling to the status quo, tinker on the edges or kick the can down the road.

   1997 December 13, F. Stephen Larrabee, Richard Sokolsky, “In a New World, NATO Must Retool Its Strategic Concept”, in The International Herald Tribune

   Fundamentalism is a product of decades of official complicity, cowardice and appeasement. Sooner or later, Mr Sharif will be forced to realise that. Until then, he is merely kicking the can down the road.

   2013 September 27, “Pakistan: kicking the can down the road”, in The Guardian

   […] one might easily despair and kick the can down the road by waiting for the next generation of computers and physical and chemical probes that can be employed for in situ measurements of chemical processes before starting to implement the research program described.

   2014, Aaron R. Dinner, editor, Proceedings of the 240 Conference: Science's Great Challenges, John Wiley & Sons, →ISBN, page 132

   It could not have more obvious that ATC was urgently needed - yet all the new Labour Government did was make vague promises of reviews and 'consideration'. It kicked the can down the road, as did subsequent governments.

   2019 December 18, Nigel Harris, “180 years of tragedy and progress”, in Rail, page 62

   Synonyms: adjourn, avert, defer, delay, dilly-dally, draw out, extend, forslow