Leadership Quote by Dan Glickman

It sounds like bureaucratic caution, but it’s also a quiet power move: when Dan Glickman says the public risks are “greater than they’ve ever been before,” he’s widening the blast radius of any given “problem” until it demands a bigger response, faster authority, and fewer objections. The phrasing doesn’t identify the problem; it elevates the category. That vagueness is the point. A “problem” can be a food-safety scare, a terrorism threat, a regulatory failure, a technology glitch - whatever the moment needs. The sentence functions like an all-purpose justification for intensified oversight.

The subtext is modern fragility. Late-20th- and early-21st-century governance is haunted by systems that are tightly coupled: industrial agriculture, global supply chains, mass transportation, centralized data, 24-hour news. When something breaks, the consequences scale quickly because everything is networked. Glickman, who served as Secretary of Agriculture in the 1990s, would have been steeped in exactly that anxiety: one contamination event can jump from a single plant to national headlines, one misstep can become a crisis of trust in institutions.

The line also leans on a familiar political tactic: safety as the trump card. “Greater than they’ve ever been” is a superlative designed to short-circuit complacency and pre-empt the argument that we’ve seen it all before. It’s less a factual claim than a posture of vigilance, one that implicitly asks the public to trade tolerance for risk in exchange for stronger regulation, more surveillance, or stricter controls - and to accept that in a high-speed society, reassurance has to sound like alarm.