Is "Defund" the Best Word Choice?

Words have meanings.  If the words you’re using mean something other than the message you’re trying to convey then you’re likely going to anger and confuse people.  If I were an umpire at a baseball game and cried “Safe!” when a runner slid into home plate, the runner would have every reason to believe that he was, in fact, safe.  But if I were to qualify my remark and say, “When I say safe, I actually mean you were really close to being safe, but you’re actually out,” a shouting match would ensue.

Similarly, a word being used in the recent racial protests is leading to anger and confusion: defund. 

Here is what I know.  Defund doesn’t mean reallocate or restructure.  It means to stop funding.  I’ve been told otherwise by several people, but saying it doesn’t make it so.  I scanned the internet for definitions just in case I was missing something, and here’s what I found.

From merriam-webster.com:
to withdraw funding from.

From Dictionary.Cambridge.org:
to stop providing the money to pay for something.

From TheFreeDictionary.com:
to stop the flow of funds to.

These definitions are consistent and clear.  So why are people telling me that it doesn’t mean what I think it means?  Matthew Yglasias provides part of the answer at Vox.org, whose article does a nice job of explaining the phrase “defund the police.”  He writes that although “in congressional budget-speak, to ‘defund’ something normally means to reduce appropriations to zero dollars, thus eliminating it” that in practice “the ‘defund’ slogan dances ambiguously between abolition-type schemes and just saying officials should spend less money on policing at the margins.”

But if you’re trying to convince people to support your cause, ambiguity is the last thing you want.  I personally wish protesters would change the slogan, but I guess “Reallocate a portion of resources from the police to mental health initiatives” is a bit cumbersome.  My fear is this: a movement that has very legitimate concerns and goals is unable to attract a large number of voters because “defund” doesn’t mean what they want it to mean.  Perhaps a different tactic is in order. 

Or, more likely, perhaps in a year the word “defund” will have an additional definition added when searching online dictionaries:

Defund:
1)  to stop the flow of funds to.
2)  to take a portion of funds from.