It's Not 1984

For progressives and members of the resistance determined to find evidence of fascism, the story was too good to disbelieve. A report in the Washington Post last weekend claimed that “the Trump administration has informed multiple divisions within the Department of Health and Human Services [HHS] that they should avoid using certain words or phrases in official documents being drafted in next year’s budget.”

The “banned” words, the story went on the explain, were these: “vulnerable,” “entitlement,” “diversity,” “transgender,” “fetus,” “evidence-based,” “science-based.”

In an instant, Twitter and Facebook were aflame with accusations of an impending totalitarian takeover. Suddenly the word “Orwellian” was everywhere. The famed New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani, for instance, had no doubt: “This is Orwellian,” she tweeted, and duly quoted a bit from Orwell’s great novel: “Quite apart from the suppression of definitely heretical words, reduction of vocabulary was regarded as an end in itself,” etc.

We wondered: Did somebody in the U.S. government really think it would advance the interests of the Trump administration to place an interdiction on disfavored words and phrases? And what purpose would a ban on these words serve, exactly? Having slogged through many indecipherable, jargon-filled federal budget documents over the years, we suspected the intent was something other than to suppress thought and bring about a fascist state. “Evidence-based” and “science-based” are the sorts of question-begging terms we wouldn’t mind seeing less of, and the word “diversity” has long since become meaningless.

Our suspicions were born out in a follow-up story in the Post. A spokesman for HHS tells the paper that “employees misconstrued guidelines provided during routine discussions on the annual budget process.” Naturally those who panicked about the “ban” dispute this claim, but it sounds vastly more believable than the word-ban theory: When submitting budget requests—that is, asking lawmakers to allocate public money—savvy operators will avoid using words likely to arouse the suspicions of the allocators. Yuval Levin, an HHS official under the Bush administration, asked his contacts inside the agency what the reason for the policy was. The evidence, he concludes, doesn’t support the Post’s interpretation: It appears that officials at the Center for Disease Control (which falls under HHS) wanted to avoid using terms that might draw criticism from Republican lawmakers. That’s still a fascinating story, as Levin points out, but it’s the very reverse of what the Post and its liberal readers thought.