Changing a definition can have enormous legal consequences. From Pete McGinnis at realclearwire.com:
The federal legislative process is messy, slow, and littered with stumbling blocks – exactly as the Founders intended. Compromise and half-loaves are built into the system. The public can learn what legislation is up for vote, and members can slow down the process as they represent their constituents and work on their policy priorities. The sluggish pace frustrates activist government whether on the left and the right, so the executive branch finds workarounds: agencies promulgate regulations, the president issues executive orders, and so on.
Yet sometimes, in order to get what it wants, the government just changes how things are defined. The simple manipulation of language or the meaning of a word can often remove obstacles and give federal agencies what they couldn’t get through legislation.
For example, the National Academy of Sciences has proposed a new definition of poverty. Ostensibly, it wants to do this because “An accurate measure of poverty is necessary to fully understand how the economy is performing across all segments of the population and to assess the effects of government policies on communities and families.”
That’s reasonable. What’s not reasonable is the new definition’s practical impact: making millions more people eligible for welfare benefits. The U.S. could get a massive backdoor extension of the welfare state – at least $124 billion over 10 years, by one estimate – because NAS arbitrarily wants a new definition.
With Congress closely divided, this kind of spending could be nearly impossible to pass. But if the Census Bureau adopts NAS’s proposed new definition, the administration doesn’t need Congress.
“When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’
’The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’
’The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.”
― Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass