Pass the buck Informal

To shift responsibility or blame for a problem or decision onto someone else instead of dealing with it oneself.

It carries a mildly critical tone, usually describing someone avoiding accountability, especially in workplace or bureaucratic settings.

The phrase comes from American frontier poker in the mid-nineteenth century, where an inanimate marker — often a knife with a buckhorn handle, sometimes simply called “the buck” — was placed in front of the player whose turn it was to deal next. An 1887 source describing card-game customs explains that this “buck” was “any inanimate object, usually a knife or pencil, which is thrown into a jack pot and temporarily taken by the winner of the pot”; whenever the deal reached the buck’s holder, a fresh pot had to be started. “Passing the buck” originally just meant passing this marker along to the next dealer, a neutral procedural act. The figurative sense of shifting blame or responsibility is recorded by 1912, and the phrase became closely tied to accountability itself through President Harry Truman, who kept a sign reading “The Buck Stops Here” on his White House desk from 1945 onward and referenced it prominently in his 1953 farewell address, inverting the original phrase to mean the opposite: refusing to pass responsibility any further.

Instead of fixing the issue, he just passed the buck to the IT department.

Managers who constantly pass the buck rarely earn their team’s trust.

The two departments kept passing the buck until nothing got done.

A: Whose job was it to approve the budget? B: No idea, everyone’s passing the buck.