(Photo illustration by Bill Kuchman/The Bulwark | Photos: Shutterstock)
by Yaniv Regev
LAST MONTH, THE DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE launched a government portal dedicated to releasing declassified files on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, or UAPs—an upmarket term for what most of us call UFOs.
Anyone with an internet connection can now watch videos of spherical objects gliding through clouds near nuclear facilities, listen to first-hand accounts from intelligence officers who describe orbs splitting apart in midair, and read Cold War–era reports of rotating discs in the sky. This deluge of information is part of what Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth called an “earnest commitment to unprecedented transparency.” For his part, Donald Trump characteristically declared: “the people can decide for themselves, ‘WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON?’ Have Fun and Enjoy!”
This is, apparently, what democratic accountability looks like in 2026.
From the self-proclaimed “most transparent administration in American history,” the transparency offensive, ranging across the UAP files and the John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. records, has been celebrated by boosters as a long-overdue reckoning with governmental secrecy. And to be sure, the argument is democratically intuitive: the government hides too much; a more transparent government is a more trustworthy one; an informed citizenry is an empowered one. It’s a tidy thesis, and one I think many people would endorse. Except it’s being weaponized—and the Trump administration’s information avalanche is the clearest proof.
THE CASE FOR TRANSPARENCY MAXIMALISM relies on a critical assumption: that the public can and will process complex, incomplete, and often highly technical information responsibly. Few assumptions are as naïve as this one.
The first two tranches of the UAP release alone contain over two hundred files—including videos from infrared military sensors, seventy-year-old field reports, and documents from various government agencies—all released in raw form, without interpretive manuals, scientific guides, or any mechanism to help the average citizen make real sense of what they’re looking at. In some cases, that’s because there is little to offer along these lines. By the government’s own admission, many of the videos are unresolved. The files have been released precisely because the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), a DoD body charged with investigating these phenomena, could not positively identify what they captured. If the experts cannot figure it out, the Trump administration seems to think, why not let the masses have a crack at it? Here’s some footage we cannot explain. You figure it out.
Well, they sure tried. Within hours of the first tranche’s release, social media was flooded with competing interpretations: The orbs were biblically accurate angels. Or they were evidence of Project Blue Beam, a decades-old theory that somehow blends Abrahamic religions, New Age, and NASA into a plot to establish a New World Order. Actually, they were demons, shifting between dimensions at 30,000 feet. One video, which Newsweek described as among “the clearest military engagement clips” in the archive, most likely featured a hobby balloon. It was included in the files anyway.
The problem is structural. Many of the files are not accessible in any meaningful sense to most people. Making sense of infrared sensor readings from classified military platforms requires the type of specialized knowledge the average American simply does not possess—nor should they be expected to, however exacting the demands of democratic citizenship. Even going through hundreds of videos and thousands of documents requires a time commitment few Americans can afford.
And so the public relies, as always, on intermediaries to make sense of this information: on pundits, podcasters, politicians, and the algorithmic feeds that determine whose interpretation reaches them first. When the government releases raw data, the wider ecosystem metabolizes it into narratives. And on a topic as inherently speculative as UAPs, those narratives don’t trend towards nuance. The opportunists fill the vacuum.
THERE IS ANOTHER STRUCTURAL PROBLEM with the transparency maximalist paradigm: Any release of government information will necessarily be incomplete. Whenever formerly classified information is disclosed, some details must be withheld: victims’ identities; active intelligence methods and sources; operational security. No serious transparency advocate argues for the government to post the nuclear codes on nukes dot gov. But the transparency maximalist dogma raises public expectations to a level at which they can never be responsibly met. Every omission, however legitimate, becomes a betrayal.
That’s the catch: The public has no way of knowing with any confidence whether an omission is made for legitimate security reasons or instead to conceal something that someone powerful would rather stay concealed. Distrust festers in the gap between plausible justification and calculated cover-up.
The Epstein files are a case in point. Following the codification of the Epstein Files Transparency Act last fall, which forced the government against the president’s will to open its confidential archive to the public, the Department of Justice began haphazardly disgorging large batches of Epstein-related files in December 2025. The release was supposed to represent the government finally coming clean about one of the most disturbing scandals of recent memory. But that’s not what happened at all. Instead, the release became a case study in how transparency initiatives can generate more suspicion than they resolve.
Thousands of the pages released by the DOJ came out drenched in black. After reviewing the original versions of the files, Rep. Jamie Raskin reported seeing “tons of completely unnecessary redactions”; a bipartisan group of lawmakers found six names they said had been improperly withheld. Adding to the fiasco, the DOJ admitted to inadvertently leaving the names of some victims unredacted while blacking out other names—those of people original investigators had considered co-conspirators, in a number of cases—for reasons never clearly articulated. One Epstein survivor accused the Department of Justice of “shielding predators.” The partial release resulted in a proliferation of theories about who was being protected, which names were missing, and, inevitably, whether the entire thing was another cover-up. You could see the transparency-to-conspiracy pipeline working in real time.
It remains unclear whether the chaotic Epstein files rollout is the result of conscious political calculation or bureaucratic incompetence. (Given the manner in which dissident Republicans joined with Democrats to force the issue over the objections of both congressional leadership and the White House, there is good reason to think the DOJ was caught off guard by the mandate.) But any amount of ambiguity in cases like this is radioactive. As soon as people begin to suspect a politically volatile release has been selectively curated, every omission becomes fuel for paranoid speculation. The light pointed at things once hidden begins to cast long shadows.
TRANSPARENCY MAXIMALISM IS NO FRIEND to democratic accountability, then. Sometimes, it even becomes a threat. And tellingly, its loudest champions are the ones least willing to be held to account.
Consider Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, and Viktor Orbán. Each built a political career railing against hidden elites and demanding the state be exposed to the light—and each, once in power, governed with conspicuous contempt for the accountability he’d once claimed to champion. The hypocrisy is not incidental to the politics: It is the politics. Bewilderment and distrust are the kerosene populists have learned to ignite.
By casting themselves as truthtellers willing to rip back the curtain, populists reify this distrust, transforming it into a political force they can control. If there’s a curtain to be torn, as the populists howl, we must conclude there is something big hiding behind it.
Of course, they don’t need to prove a conspiracy. Posing the question is sufficient. Once planted, distrust is self-perpetuating. The Pizzagate conspiracy alleged that Democratic operatives were running a child trafficking ring out of a Washington, D.C., pizzeria. It was deranged. It was also part of a larger information miasma that contributed to Hillary Clinton’s loss in the 2016 election.
When distrust in government becomes widespread—as it has over the past half century in American politics—populists gain an opening to claim a righteous mandate to dismantle institutions. Once the public has cast its leader as the knight in shining armor fighting the corrupt, blood-drinking elite, a populist tribune escapes the typical constraints of a functioning democracy; after all, such constraints are easily recast as tools of a “Deep State” defending its special privileges. The more the public believes the system is rotten, the more latitude the populist has to swing his wrecking ball.
There is, then, the question of how populists deal with the rhetoric of transparency after they attain power, a dynamic that is well illustrated by Trump’s UAP release. The PURSUE program, which stands for Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters, has been presented as a historic act of democratic disclosure. (Someone, somewhere is very proud of that acronym.) And perhaps some of it really is historic in nature. But we should recognize that the administration retains complete editorial control over what is published, selecting what to share and what to withhold, in what order, with what framing.
The transparency populist is always both prosecutor and gatekeeper. He stands at the podium declaring historic openness while retaining the power to decide what “historic openness” looks like. He benefits from the spectacle of disclosure without bearing any of the costs of genuine accountability.
IN ADDITION TO ARGUING that transparency strengthens democratic accountability, transparency advocates claim it reduces public distrust. The recent record suggests both claims are wrong. Far from alleviating public suspicion of the government’s alleged concealment of extraterrestrial visitations, the UAP releases have generated new waves of unfalsifiable speculation on social media, functionally immune to reasoned rebuttal. The algorithms optimize for engagement, and the most lurid interpretation wins.
Likewise, the Epstein files were released to raise questions about powerful men and their connections to a convicted sex offender; outgoing Rep. Thomas Massie (R–Ky.) pushed for the legislation mandating the release with a burn-it-all-down fervor for the truth to come out, no matter how wide the blast radius. But the resulting disclosures have instead unleashed questions primarily about the release itself. Who is being protected now, and by whom? Which names are missing, and why? Who decided?
Sunlight may, as Louis Brandeis said, be the best disinfectant. But transparency maximalism is closer to a floodlight: so bright, so undifferentiated, so blinding that it becomes impossible to see anything clearly at all. The problem is not transparency itself, for accountable, institutionally grounded disclosure is a genuine democratic good. The problem is twofold. Transparency maximalism, heedless of what the public can actually absorb, generates more confusion and suspicion than it can ever resolve. And transparency populism converts that suspicion into ammunition aimed at the institutions accountability depends on. The first is naïve. The second is calculated. Together they form a closed loop: distrust demands ever more disclosure, disclosure breeds ever more distrust, and the populist stands ready to collect.
Yaniv Regev studies democratic governance at Georgetown University and writes on the institutions, pathologies, and ideas that hold liberal democracy together—or don’t.