WASHINGTON—The Presidential Commission on Workplace Communication Efficiency released its final report Tuesday, concluding after 14 months and $41 million in research that the nation’s meetings could have been emails, its emails could have been silence, and its silence could have been lunch.

The 612-page document, which commissioners acknowledged “could have been a paragraph,” was presented at a three-hour public briefing that the panel’s chair described as “a necessary exception.”

“We began by examining the meeting,” said Dr. Harlan Pettibone-Voss, the commission’s chair and a former Deputy Undersecretary for Synergistic Calendar Hygiene at the Department of Commerce. “Of the 11,400 meetings we audited, 11,396 could have been emails. The remaining four were fire drills.”

Investigators then turned to the email, where they found a similar pattern. Of 2.3 million messages reviewed, the commission determined that 71 percent were sent to “keep people in the loop,” a loop the report describes as “circular, unmonitored, and largely populated by people who wished to be elsewhere.”

“Most emails exist to confirm that another email was received,” said Dr. Odalys Trenchfoot-Ammerman, Senior Fellow in Reply-All Forensics at the Institute for the Study of Things Already Said. “We found one thread, 214 messages long, whose entire substance was the phrase ‘circling back.’ It had no front.”

The commission’s central finding came in Chapter 9, titled “Silence,” which concluded that nearly all of the nation’s email traffic could have been replaced by no one saying anything. According to the report, 94 percent of workers surveyed said they would have been “fine” or “relieved” had the message never arrived.

Then the panel went one step further.

“We asked ourselves what silence is for,” said Pettibone-Voss. “And what we kept finding, at the bottom of every org chart, every agenda, every Slack channel, was a person who was hungry.”

“Every status update, every sync, every quick touch-base ultimately resolves to a human being thinking about a sandwich,” the report states. “This is the root of the tree.”

The commission recommends that federal agencies eliminate all recurring meetings, replace email with a single daily nod, and redirect the saved hours to a midday meal of at least 25 minutes, to be eaten away from the desk. An appendix proposes a pilot program in which every calendar invitation is automatically converted into a turkey and Swiss on rye.

Reaction from the business community was mixed. A spokesperson for the National Association of Stakeholders said the findings were “helpful and we’d love to schedule time to unpack them.” The commission has asked that nobody do this.

Dr. Bartholomew Quillfeather, Director of Lunchtime Studies at the Mid-Atlantic Center for Applied Noon, called the report “groundbreaking, if somewhat obvious to anyone who has ever looked at a clock.”

At press time, the commission had scheduled a follow-up meeting to discuss implementation, then cancelled it and sent a one-line email, then deleted the email and went to get sandwiches.