Politics & Power Quote by Norman Ralph Augustine

The line lands like a deadpan punchline with a spreadsheet stapled to it: Augustine isn’t predicting an actual headcount absurdity so much as staging a thought experiment about bureaucratic gravity. Pushed to a tricentennial horizon, the trend he’s needling becomes impossible to ignore: government expands by accretion, not by dramatic coups. Programs rarely die; they fossilize into agencies, compliance regimes, and contracting ecosystems. The “more government workers than there are workers” exaggeration is the point, a satirical asymptote that turns incremental growth into a visible cliff.

The specific intent is rhetorical alarm with engineer’s precision. Augustine came up through defense and aerospace management, worlds where cost overruns and procurement sprawl are practically native species. That background matters: he’s not railing against government as an idea, he’s mocking the institutional incentive structure that rewards adding layers (oversight, reporting, coordination) while punishing subtraction. The subtext is about capture and self-preservation: once an apparatus exists, it develops constituencies, career ladders, and risk-avoidance norms that make contraction politically painful and administratively taboo.

The tricentennial framing is slyly patriotic. By anchoring the warning to a national milestone, he reframes bureaucracy as a threat to the American project’s vitality, not just to budgets. It’s a satire of modern governance where the state doesn’t seize power; it hires it, one “temporary” position at a time.