There is a fairly good point here that when people argue that politician X is defunding the military or defunding schools, nobody assumes that they mean that they've ended public education or disbarred the military.
We have a general social understanding of the word "defund" that also encapsulates "moving money/responsibilities from one department to another one." So it feels a little bit like a double standard to in this case assume that it necessarily means complete abolition.
Oh sure, I get that. Any effort to change policing in America is always going to be treated like it's extreme, period. I've seen press reports arguing that merely holding police funding steady and not increasing budgets is "defunding" them.
But I think thesuitonym is still right to point out that this is inconsistent with how these words are regularly used in other contexts. There are people directly under their post arguing that no, defund literally means removing all money, the dictionary says so -- and that's just a really silly argument if we look at how the word is used most commonly in politics.
When people across multiple political parties are arguing about defunding everything from schools, to the IRS, to NASA, to the military, to the Post Office, it's just not honest for people to argue that in this specific case we should should look at the first result in Webster and ignore everything else.
We have a general social understanding of the word "defund" that also encapsulates "moving money/responsibilities from one department to another one." So it feels a little bit like a double standard to in this case assume that it necessarily means complete abolition.