too little too late

Not enough and arriving too late to resolve or save a situation. The government finally started sending trucks with supplies to the city, but it was too little, too late for the thousands of families affected by the storm. We tried to reinvigorate the company's earnings by branching into electronic publishing, but it was too little, too late, and we ended up going out of business a few months later.

An insufficient remedy applied too late to work. It is probably safe to speculate that this term originated in the military and was first applied to reinforcements that were insufficient in number and arrived too late to ensure victory or avoid defeat. Certainly the historian Allan Nevins used it with that in mind when writing about Nazi Germany in May 1935 (Germany Disturbs the Peace): “The former allies have blundered in the past by offering Germany too little, and offering even that too late, until finally Nazi Germany has become a menace to all mankind.”