A Strategic Framework for a National Plan on Aging

In September 2024, the federal government released A Strategic Framework for a National Plan on Aging — the first product of the Interagency Coordinating Committee on Healthy Aging and Age-Friendly Communities, authorized by the Older Americans Act and developed by leaders and experts from sixteen federal agencies and departments. That summer, the National Plan on Aging Community Engagement Collaborative invited public input. What follows is an assessment of the Strategic Framework — and a set of recommendations for what it must do differently if it is to realize the ambitions it has set for itself.

A national plan on aging is only as good as the framework that guides it. The Strategic Framework for a National Plan on Aging is a promising document — its values are right, its domains are well-chosen, and its acknowledgment that aging is a dynamic, interconnected process is both accurate and important. But a vision-setting document is not yet a framework. And a framework is not yet a plan.

This series examines what the Strategic Framework gets right, where it falls short, and what it would need to become a plan capable of measuring what it claims to care about, changing what it claims to want to change, and honoring the rights it claims to protect.

Preamble: A Note on the National Plan on Aging

In September 2024, responding to a call for public input from the Interagency Coordinating Committee on Healthy Aging and Age-Friendly Communities, this author submitted recommendations on the federal government's Strategic Framework for a National Plan on Aging — arguing that the Framework, while commendable in its values, was operating without the analytical scaffolding to realize them. Central to the submission was the argument that framing is not a communication strategy but a foundational determinant of policy effectiveness, and that the elder justice field's approach to ageism — ranked by the World Health Organization as the highest global priority in addressing elder abuse — has been too narrow, too reactive, and too focused on late-life manifestations rather than the lifelong, cumulative nature of age-based prejudice. The eight parts that follow develop that argument in full.

Part 1: The Framework Problem Why a National Plan on Aging Needs a Framework Worthy of the Challenge

A framework, properly understood, is not a list of priorities. It is a tool for thinking — one that maps relationships between variables, identifies gaps in evidence, assigns roles and responsibilities, and provides a basis for accountability and course correction. The Strategic Framework acknowledges interconnection without providing the analytical scaffolding to examine it. This piece identifies what is missing and why it matters.

Part 2: What a Framework Actually Is The SOCIAL Model and the Challenge of Wicked Problems

Julianne Holt-Lunstad's SOCIAL Framework — the Systemic Framework of Cross-Sector Integration and Action Across the Life Span — illustrates what a robust analytical framework looks like in practice. Aging in the United States is a wicked problem: complex, interconnected, uncertain, and resistant to simple solutions. This piece explains what a framework capable of addressing that complexity would need to do — and why the Strategic Framework does not yet provide it.

Part 3: The Frame Behind the Framework How We Think About Aging Shapes What a National Plan Can Achieve — and What It Cannot

The UN Decade of Healthy Ageing calls for fundamental shifts not only in the actions we take but in how we think about age and ageing. This piece examines what frames are, how they operate, and why they matter — drawing on Erving Goffman's foundational frame analysis and its extension into social movements by Gary Alan Fine and Philip Manning. It argues that the dominant framework through which Americans understand aging — as inevitable decline, as managed withdrawal, as a problem to be administered rather than a life to be supported — is not a neutral description of reality. It is a frame. And as the research discussed in the next part demonstrates, frames can be changed — with consequences that are not merely cultural but biological, measurable, and profound.

Part 4: When the Frame Changes What Aging Science, Mindset Research, and Nudge Theory Tell Us About How Cultural Frames Actually Shift

The theoretical argument for reframing aging has acquired empirical force. Becca Levy and Martin Slade's landmark 2026 longitudinal study found that nearly half of older adults showed measurable improvement in cognitive or physical function over time — and that positive age beliefs predicted that improvement independently of all other variables. The beliefs we hold about aging do not merely color experience. They can shape health trajectories. This piece examines the mechanisms through which frames change — drawing on Carol Dweck's research on mindset, Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein's nudge theory, and the FrameWorks Institute's Strategic Frame Analysis on aging — and asks what a national plan on aging must do to treat framing as the foundational policy instrument it has now been demonstrated to be.

Part 5: A Crisis in Plain Sight Elder Abuse, Its Root Causes, and the Framing Problem the Field Has Yet to Solve

Elder abuse affects an estimated one in ten older Americans — yet it remains largely invisible to the public, to policymakers, and to the systems designed to address it. This part examines the scale of the problem, its root causes, and the rigorous global effort to prioritize solutions. Drawing on the World Health Organization's landmark 2022 report — which mapped the evidence on elder abuse across more than 100 systematic reviews and ranked fifteen challenges through an expert survey — it finds that the field has diagnosed the problem with impressive rigor and has not yet found solutions that work. The most consequential finding is buried in the rankings: framing the issue placed eleventh among fifteen challenges, despite being the one lever with the potential to work synergistically across every other priority. Until aging is adequately framed in public consciousness and professional culture, the higher-ranked priorities — including ageism itself — will continue to strain against a substrate that makes elder abuse seem inevitable, invisible, and insufficiently urgent.

Part 6: Ageism Reframed Why the Elder Justice Field's Approach to Ageism Is Too Narrow — and What a Life-Course Perspective Would Change

The World Health Organization ranked ageism first among fifteen global challenges in addressing elder abuse globally. The elder justice field has broadly accepted that ranking. This piece asks whether the field has been addressing the right version of it. Ageism is not a late-life affliction. It begins at birth, compounds throughout the life course, and arrives in later life carrying decades of accumulated weight. A national plan on aging that treats ageism as a problem specific to older adults will address its symptoms without touching its causes — and may inadvertently reinforce the segregation it aims to undo. This piece makes the case for a life-course approach that is both more analytically accurate and more strategically effective.

Part 7: Public Health and Human Rights Why Elder Justice Needs Both — and Why Neither Is Sufficient Alone

The Strategic Framework states that elder justice is critical to ensuring that all people have the right to live with dignity, make their own choices, and participate fully in society. Realizing that commitment requires coupling a public health framework — oriented toward prevention, population-level intervention, and upstream coordination — with a human rights framework that treats legal capacity, autonomy, and equal recognition before the law as outcomes to be measured alongside health and housing. This piece explains why neither framework is sufficient alone, and what their integration would require of a national plan serious about its own stated values.

Part 8: Toward a National Plan That Works Specific Recommendations — and the Standard Against Which Progress Should Be Measured

The five preceding pieces have identified what the Strategic Framework is missing. This piece proposes what to do about it: five specific recommendations, each grounded in the analysis that precedes it. It closes with the most revealing indicator of whether a national plan on aging is working — one the field has been reluctant to name, but cannot afford to avoid. A national plan on aging should be willing to be held to it.

This series is adapted from a formal survey response to the Administration for Community Living call for public input, "Input Needed to Support Development of National Plan on Aging," September 15, 2024. Philip C. Marshall is the founder of BeyondBrooke.org. 

Image: Badlands National Park, SD