Politics & Power Quote by Andrew Card

A number like "over 100" is doing more work here than any policy memo ever could. Andrew Card isn’t offering a trivia fact about bureaucracy; he’s staging a controlled alarm. By naming a triple-digit swarm of "entities" tied to homeland security, he telegraphs fragmentation as a threat in itself: too many hands on the wheel, too many seams for danger to slip through. The phrase "have something to do with" is deliberately loose, letting the count balloon while staying technically defensible. That vagueness is the point. It turns administrative sprawl into a visceral image of disorganization.

The line lands in a post-9/11 political climate where institutional failure had become a national fixation. Card, a White House insider in the early War on Terror era, is speaking into a moment when the public was primed to accept structural overhaul as both common sense and moral necessity. The implicit argument is managerial: security isn’t just about intelligence or force; it’s about coherence. If threats move faster than agencies coordinate, then coordination becomes the battlefield.

Subtextually, the quote also shifts responsibility. Instead of dwelling on missed warnings or bad judgment, it indicts the system. "Over 100 entities" suggests no single villain, just an architecture that practically guarantees gaps and turf wars. It’s a neat political move: it justifies centralization (and the expansion of executive control) while sounding like mere organizational hygiene. In a sentence, bureaucracy becomes both scapegoat and rationale for building a new security state.