President Donald Trump’s latest idea to rename a government agency could give one of his most disliked policies a much more pleasant-sounding name. That might not work out as planned, though.
Trump shared a social media post on Sunday highlighting a woman’s suggestion that he rename U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, as National Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or NICE, “so the media has to say NICE agents all day every day.”
“GREAT IDEA!!! DO IT. President DJT” Trump wrote.
The proposed rename goes against trend for Trump, who wants to formally rename the Department of Defense the Department of War. Trump’s branding instincts in office are towards toughness, not softness.
Public opinion about ICE is firmly hardening against it, which may be why the new proposed name seems so obvious and smart. Nearly six in ten Americans disapprove of how ICE handles its job, according to a UMass poll released earlier this month, and Fox News polling shows the agency’s disapproval rising from 41% in 2018 to 58% today. Giving the agency a friendly backronym likely wouldn’t be a quick fix.
An alphabet soup of names
The U.S. government is filled with acronyms, and officials increasingly turn to backronyms, or acronyms that are reverse-engineered because of what they’ll spell out. No one loves them more than Congress.
About 10% of bill and resolution names introduced in Congress over a two-year period were backronyms, according to a 2022 review by The Atlantic, and the proportion of backronyms in bill names has risen every Congress since at least 2001.
There’s the $2 trillion pandemic stimulus and relief legislation called the “Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act” (CARES Act) in 2020, or the “Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors and Science Act” (CHIPS and Science Act) that funded semiconductors and other priorities in 2022.
With a little creativity, a piece of legislation with a name as long as a Fall Out Boy song title becomes a short, handy piece of storytelling in cable news chyrons and tweets.
Backronyms are a messaging tool that turns an otherwise bureaucratic-sounding collection of letters into a bumper-sticker-type slogan, but not all of them are honest. While some of these backronyms are corny or clever, others still are designed to misdirect or manipulate, wrapping unpopular legislation in the flag.
The USA PATRIOT Act, for “Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act,” passed weeks after the 9/11 attacks in 2001 and expanded the surveillance state, while the SAVE Act, for “Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act,” is a voter suppression bill that’s currently stalled in the Senate.
Why a ‘NICE’ rebrand is a bad idea
Renaming ICE to NICE might attract more negative attention to the group, says Brian Christopher Jones, a senior lecturer at the University of Liverpool who’s studied topics including acronyms and misleading PAC names.
“I wonder whether this particular backronym, NICE, would open the agency up to potentially even more criticism than before,” he says, noting the USA Patriot Act has been criticized for its name.
The turn in public opinion against ICE was spurred on by footage of its agents being the opposite of nice, and the proposed new name would only further draw attention to behavior that was dissonant with the backronym.
The name of the U.K.’s own NICE, which stands for National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, also hasn’t stopped people from disparaging it, Jones says. He also questions whether the proposed new name in the U.S. would turn off the people the agency is trying to attract to work there.
“I’m not so sure if law enforcement personnel would think the same about working for an agency called NICE,” he says.
Trump could try renaming the agency, but actually making ICE nice will take more than just a new acronym.