In the US media, news reporters enjoy saying "the feds" with authority, but this using of a slang term without an agreed upon definition frustrates me. Let me elaborate. Speaking as a native speaker, I've heard each of these groups referred to as "the feds":
- FBI
- DEA
- most everything else in DoJ, but not everything
- IRS
My guess is that to be a "fed", you must have standing that overlaps with another organization that exists at the State level? And, all of the "feds" must also be in the Executive Branch of the federal government? After all, the Supreme Court is not "the feds", right? Nor is Congress "the feds", right?
Further, my sense is that everyone considers the term, "the feds", to have a negative connotation. I sense that the media who demagogue "States rights" created this negative connotation? Yet, I just heard that "the feds" are going to Ferguson, Missouri to investigate an incident there; this is framed as a good thing. And anyway, which "feds" are going to Ferguson? Federal Prosecutors? FBI? Some other people from the DoJ that deal with hate crimes? Rather than say exactly who is going, it seems everyone just says "the feds" are going.
Please educate me about the political slang of my own native language. thank you.
Best Answer
J. E. Lighter, The Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang (1994) has this entry for the relevant sense of fed:
There appears to be considerable overlap between feds and the now less common term G-men ("[federal] government men"), which Lighter defines (in its singular form) as follows:
Barbara Kipfer & Robert Chapman, Dictionary of American Slang, fourth edition (2007), meanwhile, offers this much more expansive definition of Fed:
I don't think that feds has an inherently negative connotation, though a reader might detect something derisive or hostile (depending on the speaker or writer) in the use of the familiar short form "feds" instead of the formal "federal agents."
UPDATE: In a comment below, Drew asks, "When have you heard it [feds] used non-negatively? Rarely, if ever, is my guess." It's a fair question, since personal opinions without documentation tend to be rather insubstantial things. In hopes of finding some concrete examples where authors use feds non-negatively, I ran a Google Books search for the phrase "call in the feds." (I chose that phrase because it filters out irrelevant matches for "feds.") Here are some of the results I got.
From Analog Science Fact, Science Fiction, volume 57 (1956) [combined snippets]:
From Ward’s Auto World, volume 9 (1973) [combined snippets]:
From Herbert, H. Hand, Business Horizons (1975) [combined snippets]:
From John Bryan, This Soldier Still at War (1975) [combined snippets]:
From John Striker & Andrew Shapiro, Power Plays: How to Deal Like a Lawyer in Person-to-Person Confrontations and Get Your Rights (1979) [combined snippets]:
From J. Anthony Lukas, Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families (1985):
From Palmer, Palmer & Stewart, The Encyclopedia of Martial Arts Movies (1995):
From William Satterthwait, Accustomed to the Dark (2004):
From Doc Macomber, Wolf’s Remedy (2006):
In the nine examples above, I don’t find even a hint that the authors intend their use of feds to be taken as hostile, derisive, skeptical, or pejorative. Instead, they appear to be using the term simply as a neutral synonym for “agents of the federal government.” But as I note in a comment below, interpretations will surely vary.