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They say sunlight is the best disinfectant. 

There is a lot to disinfect when it comes to government malfeasance. The federal government–and a lot of state governments too, although that is a different story–is like a third-world hospital covered in MRSA. It is in need of a lot of disinfection. 

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Part of Trump’s shock-and-awe strategy to reform the federal government must be the rapid, even reckless, declassification of documents that were classified for questionable political reasons. FOIA requests should presumptively be assumed legitimate and the bias must be for transparency. And most of all, the worst of the abuses should be revealed as quickly and openly as possible. 

If mistakes will be made, except when sources, methods, and in military matters, bureaucrats should be forced to defend any request for redactions. 

The drive for transparency isn’t just necessary because the public has some abstract “right to know,” although in most cases, the public DOES have a right to know. More importantly, Trump has to make the case against all the pundits, bureaucrats, and journalists that his out-of-the-box Cabinet choices are necessary to disinfect a disease-ridden federal bureaucracy. 

The line of attack against Trump’s picks that will gain the most traction–save any scandal that cripples a nomination–is that they will come in as wrecking balls who will break a system that basically works. Americans believe the bureaucracies are creaky and inefficient, but the Establishment will sow fear and confusion about the potential failure of essential public services, and in some cases it will work. 

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MAGA loves the idea of breaking the back of the administrative state, but a lot of Americans will feel queasy about the potential fallout from massive change. That, in fact, is one of the primary reasons why things have gotten so bad and it has taken decades to come to this point. 

Maximum transparency is the antidote to this. Massive transparency will convince the public that the system isn’t creaky and inefficient; it will convince them that it is corrupt and must be completely reimagined. 

There are so many scandals covered up, so much fraud, so many underhanded deals, and so much weaponization that even the most skeptical critic will have to concede that SOMETHING has to be done to reform things. 

The fearmongering about RFK Jr. will get a most hostile response from a public convinced that the NIH, CDC, FDA, and all the other health agencies are corrupt, tied too closely to the food and pharmaceutical agencies, and that they lie to the public all day every day. 

A lot of corruption in these agencies is driven by CYA, desire to get a better job down the road, or similarly prosaic reasons. Some of it is massive, like the COVID-19 pandemic hoaxes that drove public policy and hid the fact that the US government likely funded, accidentally, one of the most deadly recent virus outbreaks, causing massive human and societal damage. 

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Conventional worries about releasing “too much” information or unduly alarming the public about small risks that are outweighed by large benefits should be discarded. This process should amount to a massive data dump, and coordination and cooperation with independent media outlets to expose the system. 

It should produce what amounts to hundreds of “Twitter Files” exposures. 

Obviously the public should get access to most of this information regardless of the political fallout, but the political benefit will be increasing momentum for reform and putting the Deep State on its heels. 

As the tech community would say, Trump has to move fast and break things. He only has two years in which he can count on Congressional support, and much of that will be grudging as the politicians often benefit from the system. If he does the massive data dump and Twitter Files-style exposure of the administrative state, he may create momentum for even more reform in the future. 

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Expose it all. Be relentless. Don’t listen to the fearmongers. 

Will some mistakes be made along the way? Maybe. Diminishing public trust even more may create a bit of collateral damage. 

But the system is so broken and corrupt that the alternative is much worse. Exposing the “trade secrets” of a Pharma company is a small price to pay for an FDA that doesn’t hold up good advances and promote bad medicine. 

Get it done. Expose it all. Move fast and break things.