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A person who has severe silicosis has to fight for every breath. A short walk that should take just 20 minutes can take an hour. Climbing stairs, carrying groceries, and normal recreational activities are distant memories.

Silicosis is typically caused by years of breathing in silica dust at work, and can worsen even after work exposures stop. In recent years, after decades of inaction, the federal government finally took several important steps to reduce the incidence of this ancient and debilitating disease. Under the Trump administration, all that progress is going away, in but one example of the widespread destruction now taking place across the federal government.

Silicosis first caught the attention of the federal government in the early 1930s, when hundreds of workers hired by the chemical company Union Carbide and its subsidiary to drill a tunnel through a mountain of almost pure silica died of silicosis. Most of the workers were Black, and many were buried in unmarked graves. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s secretary of labor, Frances Perkins, issued a report on the widespread problem across factories and mines, informing businesses that control measures, “if conscientiously adopted and applied,” could prevent silicosis.

[Read: The actual math behind DOGE’s cuts]

Perkins’s report went mostly unheeded. For all of the 20th century and the early part of the 21st century, the government’s silica-control standards failed to adequately protect workers and prevent workplace disease. Hundreds of workers employed in mines, foundries, and at construction sites developed silicosis, and some died from it. Many others died from lung cancer, also caused by silica exposure.

The 1970 law that established the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) also launched a scientific-research agency, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), whose job included providing OSHA with recommendations for health standards. In 1974, NIOSH provided OSHA with strong evidence that its silica-exposure standard needed to be more stringent—that too many workers were being exposed to too much silica, and suffering greatly as a result. (One of us, David, ran OSHA for more than seven years during the Obama administration. The other, Gregory, led the NIOSH Division of Respiratory Disease Studies for 15 years and served as deputy assistant secretary of labor in the Mine Safety and Health Administration [MSHA] for three years.)

OSHA’s process for setting this sort of health standard is not known for its speed. OSHA started working on a strengthened silica standard in 1997 and finally issued new rules for general industry and construction 19 years later (while David was running the agency)—but, significantly, the agency didn’t include mines and quarries, which are under the authority of MSHA, in the Department of Labor. Ever since, when workers face high levels of airborne silica, employers have been required to use engineering controls to reduce exposure; if airborne silica levels are still too high, employers must also provide workers with NIOSH-certified facemasks such as N95s (the N stands for “NIOSH”).

For many years, lung-disease experts employed in the congressionally mandated NIOSH Coal Workers Health Surveillance Program (CWHSP) provided medical testing and counseling to miners in an effort to identify workers who were showing early signs of lung disease, including silicosis. Under the Federal Mine Safety and Health Act, miners with a dust disease such as silicosis have the legal right to transfer to jobs with less dust exposure, and to have their exposure going forward monitored frequently. The chest X-ray readings of NIOSH’s trained and certified experts help sick miners move to safer work areas, which may improve their prognosis.

Despite OSHA’s new silica standard, MSHA’s standard remained outdated, and more miners were getting sick, particularly younger miners. Risk has been driven up by changes in mining practices, such as longer hours, the mining of seams that have less coal and more silica, and the use of new mining equipment that generates more dust. MSHA started working on a new silica standard during the Obama administration, but that work was halted when the first Trump administration came into power in 2017. The agency restarted work when Joe Biden took office and last year finally issued a strengthened silica standard.

In the few months since the second Trump administration began, the federal government’s efforts to control silicosis have been destroyed. Elon Musk’s DOGE fired the entire CWHSP team and most of the NIOSH engineers, staff, and other scientists who are doing research to make mining less dangerous. The White House made clear that virtually all of NIOSH’s functions are being permanently scrapped.

Additionally, in early April, the president signed four executive orders to promote the mining and use of coal. Then, days before MSHA’s rule could go into effect, the new leadership at the Department of Labor “paused” enforcement, claiming that employers would have difficulty complying because NIOSH no longer has staff to certify the respirators and measurement devices necessary for implementing the policy.

[Read: The missing part of Trump’s mineral math]

Although the Trump administration has not announced major personnel cuts to OSHA yet, the agency’s ability to prevent silicosis is under threat as well. DOGE has announced that 11 OSHA offices, along with 34 MSHA offices, will be closed, which will lead to fewer inspections, undoubtedly followed by more injuries and illnesses.

Even without these cuts, silicosis was already making a comeback, this time in a different industry: the fabrication and installation of artificial-stone kitchen countertops. In the Los Angeles area, more than 200 workers, almost all Latino immigrants, have developed silicosis; several have needed lung transplants. There are likely to be thousands more affected workers throughout the country, but the true number is unknown. Most of the workers in this industry are employed in small fabrication shops, and OSHA is so under-resourced and underpowered that it has had difficulty merely finding the shops where the work is being done.

Preventing silicosis is exactly the sort of essential public-health work that government employees perform with little or no recognition. When these policies work, lives are saved—invisibly, as no one can ever know who didn’t get silicosis because of good regulation and enforcement. But soon enough, if the Trump administration’s devastation of NIOSH, MSHA, and OSHA goes uncorrected, workers will certainly be getting silicosis because of inadequate public-health protections—and those losses will be quite visible, if not to the Trump administration then certainly to the people unfortunate enough to get sick.

When you think of food poisoning, perhaps what first comes to mind is undercooked chicken, spoiled milk, or oysters. Personally, I remember the time I devoured a sushi boat as a high-school senior and found myself calling for my mommy in the early hours of the morning.

But don’t overlook your vegetable crisper. In terms of foodborne illness, leafy greens stand alone. In 2022, they were identified as the cause of five separate multistate foodborne-illness outbreaks, more than any other food. Romaine lettuce has a particularly bad reputation, and for good reason. In 2018, tainted romaine killed five people and induced kidney failure in another 27. Last year, an E. coli outbreak tied to—you guessed it—romaine sent 36 people to the hospital across 15 states. Perhaps ironically, the bags of shredded lettuce that promise to be pre-washed and ready to eat are riskier than whole heads of romaine.

Eating romaine lettuce is especially a gamble right now. Although America’s system for tracking and responding to foodborne illnesses has been woefully neglected for decades, it has recently been further undermined. The Biden administration cut funding for food inspections, and the Trump White House’s attempts to ruthlessly thin the federal workforce has made the future of food safety even murkier. The system faces so many stressors, food-safety experts told me, that regulators may miss cases of foodborne illness, giving Americans a false sense of security. If there’s one thing you can do right now to help protect yourself, it’s this: swearing off bagged, prechopped lettuce.

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Americans aren’t suddenly falling sick en masse from romaine lettuce, or anything else. “There’s just millions of these bags that go out with no problem,” David Acheson, a former FDA food-safety official who now advises food companies (including lettuce producers), told me. But what’s most disturbing of late is the government’s lackadaisical approach to alerting the public of potential threats. Consider the romaine-lettuce outbreak last year. Americans became aware of the outbreak only last month, when NBC News obtained an internal report from the FDA. The agency reportedly did not publicize the outbreak or release the names of the companies that produced the lettuce because the threat was over by the time the FDA determined the cause. The rationale almost seems reasonable—until you realize that Americans can’t determine what foods are, or aren’t, safe without knowing just how often they make people sick. (A spokesperson for the FDA didn’t respond to a request for comment.)

In that information void, forgoing bagged lettuce is a bit like wearing a seat belt. In the same way that you likely don’t entirely avoid riding in a car because of the risk of an accident, it’s unnecessary to swear off all romaine because it could one day make you sick. Lettuce and other leafy greens are full of nutrients, and abandoning them is not a win for your health. That doesn’t mean, however, that you shouldn’t practice harm reduction. Buying whole heads of lettuce might just be the life hack that keeps you from hacking up your Caesar salad.

Bagged lettuce ups the odds of getting a tainted product. When you buy a single head of lettuce, you’re making a bet that that exact crop hasn’t been infected. But the process of making prechopped lettuce essentially entails putting whole heads through a wood chipper. Once a single infected head enters that machine, the pieces of the infected lettuce stick around, and it’s likely that subsequent heads will become infected. “Buying a head of romaine lettuce is like taking a bath with your significant other; buying a bag of romaine lettuce is like swimming in a swimming pool in Las Vegas,” Bill Marler, a food-safety lawyer, told me.

There’s also some evidence that chopping romaine makes the lettuce more susceptible to pathogens. One study that tested the growth of E. coli on purposefully infected romaine found that within four hours of cutting the lettuce into large chunks, the amount of E. coli on the plant increased more than twice as much as on the uncut lettuce. Shredding the lettuce was even worse; the E. coli on that plant increased elevenfold over the same time period. The theory for why this occurs is similar to the reason cuts make people more susceptible to infection; essentially, cutting romaine breaks the outer protective layer of the lettuce, making it easier for bacteria to proliferate. (This experiment was done in relatively hot temperatures, so your chopped lettuce is likely safer if you keep it refrigerated. But the convenience of pre-shredded lettuce still comes with yet another additional risk.)

[Read: The dilemma at the center of McDonald’s E. Coli outbreak]

And no, washing your bagged lettuce rigorously is not the answer. If it’s infected, only a thorough cooking is going to kill the bacteria and protect you from getting sick. Rinsing your vegetables is “a mitigation step that’s reducing risk, but it is not a guarantee,” Benjamin Chapman, a food-safety expert at North Carolina State University, told me. Buying whole heads of lettuce is an imperfect solution to a major problem, but it’s the best thing consumers can do as regulators have continued to drop the ball on food safety. A lot of lettuce is contaminated by irrigation water that comes from nearby feedlots, and yet it has taken the FDA a decade to enforce water-quality standards for most crops. The FDA has also continually fallen behind on its own inspection goals. A January report from the Government Accountability Office, the government’s internal watchdog, found that the FDA has consistently missed its targets for conducting routine food inspections since 2018.

Politicians of both parties have seemed content to make cuts to an already overstressed system. Late last year, the Biden administration announced that it was cutting $34 million in funding to states to carry out routine inspections of farms and factories on behalf of the FDA, reportedly because the agency’s budget needed to make up for inflation. And under Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the FDA is now making steep funding and staff cuts. Although the Trump administration has claimed that no actual food inspectors will be laid off as a result of government downsizing, there’s already evidence that the moves will, in fact, make it harder for the government to respond when illnesses strike. Spending freezes and cuts to administrative staff have reportedly made it more difficult for FDA inspectors to travel to farms, and for them to purchase sample products in grocery stores for testing. A committee tasked with exploring a range of food-safety questions, including probing what strains of E. coli cause bloody diarrhea and kidney failure, has been shut down, and a key food-safety lab in San Francisco has been hit with wide-scale layoffs, according to The New York Times. (Employees at the San Francisco lab told me that they are now being hired back.)

Skipping prechopped bagged lettuce might sound like neurotic advice, but a leafy-green outbreak is almost guaranteed to occur in the coming months. One seems to happen every fall, and it’ll be up to RFK Jr. to respond. Although Kennedy has promised to foster a culture of radical transparency at the federal health agencies, his first months on the job haven’t been reassuring. The staff at the FDA’s main communications department—employees typically tasked with briefing national news outlets during outbreaks—have been fired. So have staff at public-record offices. Government updates on the ongoing bird-flu outbreak have virtually stopped. It’s reasonable to assume that the Trump administration will take a similar “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” approach to foods that can make us sick.

“I’m really worried that we are going to see the number of outbreaks, and the number of illnesses, go down—and it has nothing to do with the safety of the food supply,” Barbara Kowalcyk, the director of the Institute for Food Safety and Nutrition Security at George Washington University, told me. “It just means if you don’t look for something, you don’t find it.” With so much uncertainty about food safety, busting out a knife and chopping some lettuce beats a trip to the hospital, or a night hugging the toilet.

On many nights, John Allaire can turn off the lights in his house and keep reading a book by the glow of 80-foot-high flares blasting from a gas export terminal a mile away.

The prospect of a second liquefied natural gas, or LNG, terminal in his once-peaceful corner of southwest Louisiana is unsettling for Allaire, a retired oil and gas engineer whose house sits near Calcasieu Pass.

“There’s the ongoing noise pollution, ongoing flaring,” he said. “And the light pollution is unbelievable.”

Venture Global, the U.S.’s second-largest LNG producer, plans to build a second terminal alongside its Calcasieu Pass facility in sparsely populated Cameron Parish. Venture also owns the newly built Plaquemines LNG terminal, about 20 miles south of New Orleans.

The proposed second Venture terminal in Cameron, dubbed CP2, was recently granted an export permit by the Department of Energy. The permit was the fifth LNG-related approval from the department since President Donald Trump took office and lifted former President Joe Biden’s pause on new LNG permits.

The Trump administration aims to cut “red tape around projects like CP2” and boost the availability of “affordable, reliable, secure American energy,” said Energy Secretary Chris Wright in a statement.

Louisiana has four LNG terminals and two more are under construction. Many more are welcome, said Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry.

“Every time these projects come to Louisiana, [they] give the people of our state the ability to have their income raised,” he said during a speech last month announcing Australian company Woodside Energy’s decision to invest nearly $18 billion in a stalled terminal project, formerly known as Driftwood LNG, near Lake Charles, about 22 miles north of CP2.

Environmental groups say reviving the LNG building boom has serious consequences for coastal communities, fisheries, and the climate.

Venture Global CEO Michael Sabel speaks at the company’s LNG export facility in Plaquemines, Louisiana, alongside Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry, and Secretary of Energy Chris Wright. (Jack Brook / AP Photo)

“It has been damaging to our coast, damaging to our air quality and our water quality,” said Anne Rolfes, director of the Louisiana Bucket Brigade. “It’s destroyed property values [and] it’s certainly damaging to our health.”

Venture did not respond to a request for comment.

LNG is natural gas cooled to a liquid state, compressing its volume and making it easier to store and ship long distances. Six of the country’s eight LNG export terminals dot the western Gulf Coast, including the world’s largest, Sabine Pass LNG in west Cameron. LNG shipments from the U.S. have skyrocketed over the past decade, rising from about 16 billion cubic feet in 2014 to just under 4.4 trillion cubic feet last year, making the U.S. the world leader in LNG exports. A little more than half of U.S. LNG goes to Europe, where demand has slowed in recent years, but Asia is hungry for more, with that continent’s share of exports rising to more than 30 percent last year, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Venture’s Calcasieu Pass terminal had a rocky start-up process that began in 2022 and ended last month when the facility sent its first shipments. The company’s construction strategy, which relied on prefabricated, modular components to speed construction and cut costs, resulted in power outages, several repairs, and dozens of pollution violations, according to company documents and a report by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. In 2022, the facility exceeded its air pollution permits 139 times, according to the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality, or DEQ. A March warning letter from DEQ indicated many problems haven’t been fixed. The letter cited recent inspections showing several “areas of concern,” including frequent emissions violations and failures to report air pollution exceedances.

Much of the pollution comes from flaring, a process often triggered by operational malfunctions that force facilities to burn excess gas to avoid fires or explosions. Flaring emits chemicals that can cause cancer, respiratory illnesses, and other health problems.

The Calcasieu Pass facility is allowed 60 flaring hours annually by DEQ, but nearby residents allege it goes well over that allowance.

“It’s been ongoing, sometimes days in a row,” Allaire said.

Commercial shrimpers in Cameron and Calcasieu parishes say dredging to deepen waterways for large LNG transport ships has harmed habitat and made fishing harder.

“The numbers we’re catching now have decreased drastically,” shrimper Travis Dardar said.

Boosting the U.S.’s LNG export prowess is “part of one of the biggest fossil fuel build-outs in our lifetimes” and will dampen efforts to shift toward cleaner energy sources like solar and wind, said Ethan Nuss, an organizer with the Rainforest Action Network.

“This will deepen the climate crisis and lock us into decades of emissions,” he said.

Rolfes said opposing LNG is now doubly hard because both the state and federal government strongly back the industry. Instead of focusing on regulators, environmental groups may attempt to delay projects through lawsuits or convince the industry’s insurers and investors that LNG is a bad long-term bet.

“We’ll keep getting the word out about their accident history [and] their horrible track records as business partners,” Rolfes said. “But we acknowledge the odds are tremendous.”