Politics & Power Quote by James F. Byrnes

Byrnes lands the joke with a bureaucrat's scalpel: immortality, that grand human craving, gets downgraded to something far more stubborn and far less inspiring - a government bureau. The line works because it flips the usual reverence for permanence. We tend to treat longevity as proof of value; Byrnes suggests it can just as easily be proof of institutional inertia. A bureau survives not because it's right, or effective, or loved, but because it has files, procedures, appropriations, and a self-justifying logic that outlives the people who designed it.

The subtext is a warning about the asymmetry between political time and administrative time. Elected officials campaign on change, then collide with agencies built to persist: rules accrete, forms multiply, missions expand, and sunset clauses mysteriously fail to arrive. Byrnes isn't attacking the idea of government so much as the tendency of systems to become organisms, guarding budgets and turf with a survival instinct that looks, from the outside, like eternal life.

Context matters: Byrnes was a New Deal-era power broker who moved through Congress, the Supreme Court, the State Department, and wartime mobilization. He saw government grow rapidly, then watched how emergency structures and wartime offices hardened into peacetime fixtures. Coming from an insider, the cynicism carries extra bite. It's not anti-government rhetoric from the cheap seats; it's gallows humor from the control room, pointing out that the hardest thing to repeal is not a law, but a living institution.