WASHINGTON — It’s a time-tested Washington strategy for making a difficult policy question disappear: death by “blue ribbon” commission.

Presidents, Congress and some agency heads set up panels stocked with subject experts to offer sage advice to policymakers. But these panels sometimes are used to slow-walk thorny policy into oblivion.

President Donald Trump chose what one expert calls “the blue ribbon option” when he assigned a sensitive gun control proposal to a new panel on school safety, part of a package the White House announced Sunday in response to the school shooting in Parkland, Fla. He put Education Secretary Betsy DeVos in charge of the panel and left clues that a key proposal he’s voiced support for — raising the purchase age for some firearms — was now in doubt.

There’s “not much political support (to put it mildly),” the president tweeted about the proposal, which is opposed by the National Rifle Administration.

For lawmakers and presidents, creating a commission “represents movement, it’s something that they can report, especially if they’re subject to criticism that they’re taking no action or they’re tone deaf,” said Kenneth Kitts, a political science professor at the University of North Alabama and the author of “Presidential Commissions and National Security: The Politics of Damage Control.”

Commissions through history have produced important historical information, policy and even material for criminal trials. President Lyndon B. Johnson ordered the Warren Commission to produce a record of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. President George W. Bush’s 9-11 Commission was established to account for the circumstances surrounding the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

Others were less successful. In 2010, President Barack Obama’s bipartisan debt reduction commission did not win enough votes among its members to send it to Congress for a vote.