I’ll leave the progress report on the dismemberment of USAID, and the reasons it deserves percussive defenestration from the top of the Washington Monument, to those with a better grasp of the details. Suffice it to say, things have been off the rails at that agency for quite some time, but a bit of sunlight appears to be disinfecting things quite nicely, so far.

Of course, things have yet to fully roll into the federal courts, which I expect will complicate things a tad right quick. I’m sure the unions and other perpetrators will gum up the works as much as they can. Perhaps they think something shiny will distract the president, or perhaps they think their allies/coconspirators in Congress will take heart from early judicial successes and start throwing spanners in the works for them.

President Trump is taking potshots from folks who assert that USAID is a drop in the federal budget bucket. To that, I suggest President Trump adopt a “Broken Windows” approach to this. As was done to reduce crime in New York, small infractions should be taken seriously and run down until they are either reformed or dissolved. No fraud, waste, or abuse of the taxpayers’ treasure or trust can be overlooked, no matter how small.

I look forward to watching as more details of how the government has spent and misspent trillions of dollars in the past few years see the light of day. Even if President Trump loses in court, these things are in the public record now. Attempts to obfuscate or deny the data would likely need to be based on assertions that the data, provided by the government itself, is incorrect. I don’t see those who profit from the illusion that the government is good at what it does asserting that the government isn’t keeping accurate books.

As time goes on, we need to convince the Congress to change or create laws to prevent the knot President Trump is cutting through from being retied. Like I said during the Obama years, if you live by the executive order, you will die by the executive order. Republicans won’t be in charge forever, and a legal basis for challenging reconstruction of the federal bureaucracy needs to be built now.

Congress must pass laws preventing what we’re seeing at USAID and will inevitably come to light in the rest of the federal government, as well as prohibiting the bureaucracy from becoming as Byzantine and opaque as it is now. A ban on grants to organizations at all connected to politics, accounting and auditing requirements, and a publicly searchable database of all federal expenditures, updated at least quarterly, would be a good start.

Give the American people the ability to oversee what’s going on in the government, and the geeks amongst us will show us the meaning of haste as they fold, spindle, and mutilate the data. Counting coup when finding someone abusing power or pubic trust, no matter which side of the political spectrum the watcher and watched are on, should be celebrated.

In the meantime, I’m off to write a quick missive to my congresscritters, encouraging them to support the drawing and quartering of the federal bureaucracy.