I'm not saying people should implicitly trust the government.

I'm saying that lack of trust, and lack of the ability of people and government to meet in a way that develops trust, is the issue that underlies people holding up a "$1280 coffee mug" as an example of government waste.

The ideal is that representatives you do trust would be evaluating the government for you, and so you would be building trust by experiencing trust with one or more of your representatives. But the scale of the federal government has resulted in few people actually trusting their representatives, and the experience of having a trust test with a representative doesn't scale. This is the fundamental issue.

To be totally clear, I am implying that a change to the system needs to proceed towards improvements in accountability and visibility, so that people can experience more legitimate trust in their government.

People shouldn't need to trust. If you architect the system around it then it will attract people who want to abuse that trust. The system needs to be designed so that no trust is needed, the "correct" thing to do for any given cog in it is also the "correct" thing overall.