Former Nationals deputy leader Fiona Nash in April 2017 sent the capital into a tailspin when she announced a policy to decentralise the Australian Public Service and send jobs into regional towns.

Since the dual citizenship saga ensnared decentralisation's greatest champions in government — Barnaby Joyce and Ms Nash — the momentum seems to have slowed.

Her exit from parliament, and Mr Joyce's resignation of the Nationals' leadership, left the policy in an apparent rut and the only signs of any movement was the quiet busywork of a parliamentary committee inquiry that seems destined only to report feebly on its merits.

Public servants have been in the dark as cabinet uses its privilege of secrecy to hide its decisions on whose jobs will leave the cities and which ones will stay.

Apart from a few half-hearted endorsements of decentralisation from the Nationals in 2018, what began as a massive threat to the ACT's economy has apparently lost its purpose.

The federal budget last week contained the latest on the project. Bush dwellers who raised their hopes of receiving an agency and more jobs to breathe life into their ailing economies might well be disappointed.

A wholesale relocation of agencies into the regions was absent. It announced jobs from six agencies would move into "the bush", a term to be applied very loosely, as it turns out.

Positions from the Office of the Registrar of Indigenous Corporations will move from Canberra to Darwin, some Prime Minister and Cabinet jobs will relocate from Melbourne to Shepparton, and the Unique Student Identifier Register will move from Canberra to Adelaide.  Some Human Services department staff will move from the Sydney CBD to, well, Sydney. Parramatta, to be precise.

Twelve jobs from the Infrastructure department will also relocate to the regions.

The jobs moved are few, and will make barely a ripple in the economies of their new home towns. So far, decentralisation is a squeak where the Nationals promised a roar. The Coalition has hinted there may be more announcements to come, and says it's committed to the policy. Regional towns better hope so.

Adelaide is a capital city populated by 1.4 million people, and Darwin, while regional, is another capital that fares much better economically than the struggling country towns that have been gutted by lost industries and a chronic lack of opportunity. Parramatta is a commercial centre inside Sydney.

The flimsy rationale the Nationals used to launch the decentralisation push has evolved into a sloppy and ill-defined set of goals for the policy. Cities benefit when the Nationals said the regions would. Mayors, councillors and regional government bodies should be asking some pointed questions of the Coalition that promised them so much.

Canberrans will have some pretty serious questions of the government too. The Coalition has assured people behind the scenes that, for all the theatre of the Nationals' decentralisation promise, the project would likely leave the national capital largely unaffected and would target jobs that would not be missed from Sydney and Melbourne.

It hasn't been the case so far. Following the loss of the pesticides authority, many of the next moves also uproot Canberra-based jobs. Decentralisation started out a confused and potentially damaging project. The Coalition needs to articulate — for Canberrans, and for the bush — what exactly it wants the policy to achieve.