What do we call it when a federal agency reaches into five state budgets, pulls out ten billion dollars earmarked for daycare slots and food assistance and keeping the lights on for low-income families, and announces — in a press release pitched at the emotional register of a dentist’s rescheduling text — that the money has merely been paused?
I was in Georgetown Friday at Eliza’s, a small dinner, eight people, the kind of evening where the rosemary is from the garden and the politics is from everywhere. There was a lobbyist there I’ll describe only as bipartisan, which is how he describes himself when the recorder is on and how I describe him when it isn’t. Someone brought up the freeze between the first course and the second. The lobbyist set down his fork and said the word “review.” Then he said it again. He said it as if saying it twice made it a sentence.
A review, he explained, is not a freeze. A pause is not a cut. The money has not been taken away; it has been — and here he made a gesture I have seen at every Washington dinner since the second Bush administration, a kind of horizontal smoothing motion, as if calming a small dog — held. I asked him whether the daycare in Dayton that closes next month because its subsidy didn’t arrive understood the distinction between a hold and a cut. He examined his cufflink. Eliza, who has known me since 1997 and has developed a tone for these moments, said, “Margaret, please.”
Please what, exactly. Please don’t notice that a verb is doing the work a policy used to have to do. Please pretend, between the lamb and the cheese, that ten billion dollars in childcare and family support has been gently set on a shelf, where it waits, patient and unbothered, while the children whose mothers can no longer afford to drop them off wait too. Please respect the agency’s preferred terminology. Please pass the salt.
I read the HHS release three times Saturday morning. It is a small marvel of the form. Nothing is cut. Nothing is denied. Funds are being “reviewed for alignment.” States are being “engaged.” A “recalibration period” is “underway.” The release contains the word “families” six times and the word “temporary” four times and the word “ten billion” zero times, because numbers, you understand, are vulgar. Numbers tell you what the verbs are trying to hide.
My sister-in-law Judy, who has worked at the National Archives long enough to have professional opinions about how regimes phrase things, called me Sunday. She has been reading a great many internal memos lately, in her line, and she said the thing that struck her was how confident the language was. Not defensive. Not hedging. The memos of an administration that does not expect to be asked. “They’ve stopped writing for history,” she said. “They’re writing for the next press cycle, and they’ve correctly assessed that the press cycle is four days.”
Four days is, in fact, generous. The freeze was announced Friday afternoon. By Monday morning the cable shows had moved to Davos, where our betters were “reimagining the social contract” from a chalet, and to a bank’s quarterly earnings, which exceeded expectations, as banks’ earnings now do as a matter of municipal routine. The five states whose budgets were quietly disassembled did not make the chyron. The daycare in Dayton did not make the chyron. The chyron, on Monday, was a man in a fleece vest explaining synergy.
What I want to know, and what the bipartisan lobbyist could not tell me between the lamb and the tarte, is this: at what specific point did we agree that the executive branch could withhold ten billion dollars in appropriated funds and call it a pause, and that the rest of us would call it a pause back, and that the children whose subsidies evaporated would call it whatever they call things when nobody is asking them? It was not a vote. I would remember a vote. It was a verb, and we accepted the verb, and the verb did the rest.
Eliza served a pear thing at the end. It was excellent. The lobbyist asked for the recipe. We talked, by then, about something else.