Lustration policies are often bogged down by the paradoxical nature of public trust during a political transition. A strong rationale for engaging in administrative purges is to signal that a political transition is real and that the authoritarian past is being put to rest. Officials responsible for a transition want to signal that the emerging democratic polity will operate differently from its corrupt and dangerous predecessor. Such signaling is achieved, inter alia, by displacing those who were responsible for administering the corrupt and vicious policies of the past. And surely, public trust does depend on communicating to ordinary citizens that a fresh political start has been made—that a new and lawful polity has been launched. On the other hand, public trust also depends on the functionality and competence of government. The trains need to run, licenses need to be issued or renewed, roads need to be maintained, and public order has to be kept. And if the bureaucratic class that knows how to do these things is subtracted from post war politics because of how it behaved under the previous regime, the daily operation of government is likely to suffer. And public trust is likely to tumble accordingly (this is when we begin to hear that “at least under Saddam the trains ran on time”, etc.) The first dilemma of lustration,then, concerns its scope: how does one lustrate enough so that public trust (and retributive justice) are served, without lustrating so much that the organs of government are undone and public trust is lost as a  result?[35] 