In what observers are calling a “decisive intellectual contribution to the discourse,” a prominent policy institute has released a 240-page report proposing to address the country’s most persistent challenges through the time-tested mechanism of giving them different names.

The report, titled Renaming as Reform: A Framework for Strategic Vocabulary, argues that the most efficient policy lever available to modern governance is the press release announcing that a thing is now called something else.

“Solving problems is expensive and politically difficult,” explained one of the report’s authors, a fictional senior fellow named Carter Lansing-Vance. “Renaming them is neither. We believe the data is clear.”

The report includes an extensive glossary of suggested substitutions. Inflation would become “Price Discovery Activity.” Traffic congestion would be reclassified as “Roadway Engagement.” The federal deficit would henceforth be known as “Forward Capacity Investment,” a phrase researchers say polls 31 points more favorably in focus groups composed entirely of people who were not paying attention.

Health care, the authors note, has long benefited from this approach, and they cite the discipline’s pioneering work in transforming “waiting” into “scheduling efficiency outcomes.”

Critics within the field have raised mild objections, suggesting that the proposed framework may not address the underlying problems being renamed. The report acknowledges this concern in a footnote, which clarifies that addressing underlying problems is “out of scope.”

A second tier of recommendations addresses institutional reform. The report suggests that congressional gridlock be rebranded as “Deliberative Equilibrium,” a phrase one senior fellow described as “what we used to call doing nothing, but with a participle.”

Implementation, the authors stress, requires whole-of-government coordination. They propose the establishment of a new agency, the Office of Strategic Renaming, which would be funded entirely by renaming an existing office and claiming the savings.

Reaction across the policy community has been broadly favorable, with several rival institutes already announcing their own forthcoming reports on related themes. One competing think tank confirmed it is preparing a counterproposal under the working title Beyond Renaming: Toward a Theory of Re-Renaming.

A representative of the institute confirmed that the report’s recommendations have already been adopted internally. The institute itself, previously known as a think tank, will now be referred to as a “Civic Cognition Platform.”

Sources close to the project say a follow-up volume is in preparation, focused on the bold idea of issuing the same recommendations a second time and calling it “iterative analysis.”