I took a trip into Trump Country last week—California’s central valley—on my way to visit the giant sequoia groves in Yosemite and King’s Canyon National Parks. Republicans can take credit for saving the sequoias. As the civil war raged, Abraham Lincoln signed a bill granting the land to California “for public use, resort, and recreation.” Standing amongst these ancient trees, the largest in the world, I could not help but feel privileged and proud to be an American, and yes, proud of our national government.

To state the obvious, our national government does not exist to turn a profit. It exists to serve American citizens. One fundamental government service—right up there with exercising the state’s monopoly on violence—is ensuring the safety of the food supply. This service was critically undermined this week by mass firings at the Department of Health and Human Services.

To take one concrete example, we now know from reporting—not the Department itself—that the layoffs included around 170 workers in FDA’s Office of Inspections and Investigations, and that these layoffs will result in fewer inspections of food facilities. Food inspectors will now spend more time on tasks like booking travel and finding translators for overseas missions, and less time on actually inspecting. To accommodate this shift, federal officials are planning fewer routine inspections so that inspectors can focus on the worst cases.

This contradicts an HHS “fact sheet” that asserts the FDA layoffs “will not affect drug, medical device, or food reviewers, nor will it impact inspectors.” The fact sheet continues to represent the sole information offered on the HHS website about why the Department is getting rid of around a quarter of its staff, or 20,000 employees. Nothing on the FDA website even acknowledges that the agency dismissed 3,500 employees this week, or references the broader HHS “announcement,” much less explains how the new “restructured” agency will look. Indeed, to look at the FDA website, the only news this past week was Martin Makary being sworn in as the new Commissioner.

Makary has his work cut out for him. He has signed up to deliver “radical transparency” to the public with a now decimated communications team, and no staff to answer public records request, among other gaping holes. Even if Makary deftly manages FDA’s remaining workforce in a way that minimizes disruptions to food safety inspections, not to mention ongoing reforms to prevent contamination of infant formula, regulate chemical additives in food, speed up recalls, and address many other pressing problems, he will by “flying blind” if the Administration continues along this path.

The FDA’s recent reorganization illustrates the value of transparency—radical or otherwise—to industry and consumers alike. In the wake of an infant formula crisis that justifiably incensed the public and lawmakers, the agency relied on extensive hearings, culminating in an expert report commissioned by the Reagan-Udall Foundation. When then-Commissioner Califf suggested that the agency would not adopt some of the report’s restructuring recommendations for FDA’s inspection division, a diverse coalition of stakeholders pressed him to reconsider. Eventually FDA announced a more comprehensive reorganization that established clear lines of accountability for food safety.

That was democracy in action. It goes beyond just elections. Had the Trump Administration invited some deliberation on its plans to cut FDA’s workforce, it would have had to contend with some of the obvious flaws in its plans, and the harms to public health that they posed. Anyone who has experience with federal hiring, for example, would tell you that “centralizing administrative functions” is hardly a panacea, and HHS’ plans to consolidate various tasks, including communications, will not likely improve efficiency.

Of course, this Administration, for all its talk, may not actually be so interested in efficiency. Trump Administration officials may just want to distract voters from efforts to enrich themselves, through crypto schemes and arbitrary tariff policies that create a patronage state. This was the warning, prior to the election, from Trump opponents like Corey Booker, who warned that “Make America Health Again” was a lie. Booker’s advice: “pay more attention to what people do than to what they say.” These days, Secretary Kennedy is making that advice difficult to ignore.