" The most powerful aspect of any bureaucracy, in Kidd’s eyes, was the same thing that gave cancer its power: it was immortal. If you didn’t seek it out and kill it, cell by cell, it’d just keep growing. Bureaucracies could chase you forever. You could defeat them over and over and over again, and the bureaucracy didn’t much care, though some individual bureaucrats might. The bureaucracy, as a whole, just kept coming, as long as the funding lasted. "

― John Sandford , Silken Prey (Lucas Davenport, #23)