Leadership Quote by Jerry Brown

Bureaucracy, in Jerry Brown's telling, behaves like a gas: give it space and it swells until it chokes the room. The joke lands because it smuggles a hard administrative truth inside a homely image. Everyone knows the feeling of a briefcase getting heavier without anything genuinely important being added. Brown turns that mundane irritation into a diagnosis of government: systems don’t merely process information; they manufacture it.

The line riffs on Parkinson's Law (work expands to fill the time available), but swaps time for paperwork, updating an old critique for the age of memos, binders, and compliance culture. Brown’s specific intent isn’t just to dunk on “red tape.” It’s to argue that complexity is self-justifying. Once agencies and staffs exist to generate documents, those documents become proof of diligence, and diligence becomes a substitute for results. Paper becomes both product and shield: evidence that something is being done, and a buffer against blame when it isn’t.

As a politician, Brown is also signaling taste and temperament. The subtext is austerity-of-mind: I’m the adult who won’t confuse a thick stack with a serious plan. It flatters voters who suspect government is bloated, while offering insiders a sly warning about institutional inertia. In the late-20th-century governance world Brown inhabited, the briefcase isn’t just a prop; it’s a portable bureaucracy, expanding quietly until someone decides that less paper might mean more accountability.