The other day I was listening to a BBC Radio 4 podcast during which they interviewed an American Senator; forgive me but I can't remember his name. Anyway, at one point he mention the expression:

"in the near term"

Now initially, I thought that as he was speaking 'live' he had confused two fairly strong collocations being:

"in the short term" with "in the near future" and had fused them together as this kind of 'error' is fairly common with native speakers when we begin speaking with one idiomatic expression in mind and then change horses midstream as a second closely related idiom or expression becomes somewhat stronger in our minds, especially during natural conversations rather than staged or scripted 'public speaking'.

However, after doing a quick corpus check on the British National Corpus, I found seven instances of it being registered; all but one being from electronic online newspapers or journals. Now this is not the usually response to a collocation search as one would expect to find well over 300 responses.

Personally, until today I would probably have made students aware of the two alternatives I highlighted in blue above and probably put the learners 'error' down to mixing them up. But now I'm not so sure, especially as I heard a second US native speaker say the same collocation today on another podcast.

So my question is this, mainly directed at US English speakers, as I haven't yet heard a UK English native speaker say it (but that may well change soon!)

1.   Would you say that "in the near term" is a widely used/strong collocation in US English or other varieties of English?

2.   How would you deal with a learner who produced that construction?