damage control

American  

noun

1. a department or group, as aboard a naval vessel, responsible for taking action to control damage caused by fire, collision, etc.

2. any efforts, as by a company, to curtail losses, counteract unfavorable publicity, etc.

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damage control Idioms  

1. Measures to minimize or curtail loss or harm. For example, As soon as they discovered the leak to the press, the senator's office worked night and day on damage control. Used literally since the 1950s, specifically for limiting the effect of an accident on a ship, this term began to be used figuratively in the 1970s.

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Other Word Forms

• damage-control adjective

Example Sentences

Such damage control could revive their stocks after this year’s brutal selloff, driven by fears that AI would render software and services providers irrelevant.

From Barron's

A day after federal prosecutors announced that the catastrophic Palisades fire was caused by the rekindling of a smaller arson fire days earlier, Los Angeles city officials were in damage control mode.

From Los Angeles Times

I do damage control on my cookies and cream, licking around the circumference of the cone to avoid getting sticky, but it’s no use.

From Literature

“Regret without accountability is just damage control – an attempt to move on while the rest of us are expected to sit with the discomfort of our careers being publicly tied to him,” she wrote.

From The Wall Street Journal

Meanwhile, Cosentino, a Wasserman client since 2021, wrote in a letter posted to social media that her agency head’s response to the backlash was “not enough... Regret without accountability is just damage control.”

From Los Angeles Times