The Wall Street Journal recently published an article titled “Trump’s Sweeping Expulsions Have Sent the FBI Into Chaos.” Six of the most senior officials at the FBI, including one who was a lead investigator in the 9/11 attacks, were said to have been given an ultimatum to resign within four days or be fired. Representing nearly 200 years of FBI experience, the six handed in their badges and left the agency. More than two dozen senior career officials there had reportedly been dismissed earlier.

According to the article, Kash Patel, President Trump’s nominee for FBI Director (now confirmed), had signaled that he would shrink the bureau’s counterintelligence and counterterrorism activities. His goal is to move more of the FBI’s agents, analysts and technical experts to focus on illegal immigration, which is a historically non-core function of the FBI. Amid all that chaos, work at the agency is said to have slowed considerably. Several influential voices have warned in the past few weeks that the dismissals and resignations at the FBI pose a grave national security threat.

There is something about experiencing life in a dysfunctional society that makes a person feel constantly like they suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. I have that affliction. I grew up in a poor country, Ghana, where basic survival was a constant struggle for most people. But the simplicity of life in those days, and the generosity of people who lived in local communities, compensated a great deal for the misery that most citizens endured.

The Ghana that I lived in during the latter part of my boyhood days was considerably different. The country had become a bit less poor, but myriad factors had combined to shatter the social cohesion that existed before. It became every man for himself. With rapid deterioration of most of the basic services such as public education, healthcare, infrastructure and law enforcement that government used to provide, life became a lot harder for those who didn’t have the means. Today, the surge in violent crime, especially in the major cities and towns, has become a real headache for citizens. In many places, people essentially pay for private security to protect themselves and their families.

Most native-born Americans have not experienced anything close to the kinds of lives that many immigrants have fled from. The peace of mind that comes from living in a functional society one’s entire life is a tremendously precious thing. But that lack of exposure can sometimes lead to dangerous complacency.

I was quite troubled by the Wall Street Journal headline because just a few days before seeing it, I had finished reading David Grann’s excellent book, Killers of the Flower Moon. In it, Grann deftly tells the story of how the FBI, as we know it today, came into being. I have always understood the extraordinarily important role that the bureau plays in protecting our society, but my respect for the men and women who work in the agency grew immensely after reading Grann’s book. Learning about that history also made me appreciate the special nature of the people who serve as FBI agents.

According to Grann, the Osage Indians who live in the Osage territory of Oklahoma today were driven out of their original lands in Kansas in the 1870s by white settlers. Their new settlement was a rocky, supposedly worthless reservation in northeastern Oklahoma. But mere decades after they arrived, the Osage struck gold. It turned out that their new land was atop one of the largest oil deposits in the country.

The Osage promptly began receiving payments for leases and royalties from prospectors. Within a few years after the oil discovery, the Osage had become the wealthiest people per capita in the world, in the view of some observers. Grann says that reporters of the day started referring to them as the “plutocratic Osage with their brick-and-terra-cotta mansions and chandeliers, with their diamond rings and fur coats and chauffeured cars.” One account described an Osage party arriving at a traditional dance ceremony in a private airplane. Their new land, considered useless previously, suddenly attracted “cowboys, fortune seekers, bootleggers, soothsayers, medicine men, outlaws, New York financiers, and oil magnates.”

And then a series of mysterious Osage deaths began to occur. The Osage suspected that someone or some group of people was murdering them in order to gain access to their parcels of land and the associated oil royalties. Some families hired private detectives to help them find the killers.

The combined efforts of the private detectives, the county sheriff, and the justice of the peace proved to be no match for the killers. Fear of becoming victims themselves made most people afraid to even discuss the cases. The sheriff is said to have dropped “even a pretense of investigating the crimes,” later admitting that “I didn’t want to get mixed up in it.” About resolving the cases, he said that “It is a big doings and the sheriff and a few men couldn’t do it. It takes the government to do it.”

After a while, and with no apparent progress by the local authorities, the Osage appealed to the federal government to get involved. The Osage Tribal Council passed a formal resolution requesting the services of the Justice Department “in capturing and prosecuting the murderers of the members of the Osage Tribe.” The problem was that the federal authorities were nowhere near capable of dealing with the problem as the tribal leaders assumed they were.

The FBI was created by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1908. Before then, law enforcement responsibility fell primarily on state and local authorities. President Roosevelt wanted federal involvement in that arena, despite widespread opposition in the country to that idea. Roosevelt’s attorney general is said to have created the agency without legislative approval, leading to one congressman referring to it as a “bureaucratic bastard.” Initially, the bureau had limited jurisdiction over crimes, with agents handling minor issues like interstate shipments of stolen cars, contraceptives, and smutty books.

In 1925, the newly appointed FBI Director, J. Edgar Hoover, was struggling to hold on to his job. He was under enormous pressure to resolve the Osage murder cases but the bureau didn’t have the personnel with the required expertise to handle anything of that complexity. Hoover scoured the field offices for the right agent to lead the investigation. Fortunately for him, he found his man in Tom White, the special agent in charge of the Houston office.

Grann describes White as an old-style lawman who had served in the Texas Rangers for several years. He had spent much of his life roaming on horseback across the southwestern frontier, Winchester rifle in hand, “tracking fugitives and murderers and stick-up men.” Portrayed as six-feet-four with sinewy limbs and the eerie composure of a gunslinger, Grann adds that “Even when dressed in a stiff suit, like a door-to-door salesman, [White] seemed to have sprung from a mythic age.”

In several chapters, Grann meticulously details the harrowing nature of the work White and his assembled team of agents did to track down the killers. The mastermind of the murders, a white man named William Hale, was a Texas man who had relocated to the Osage territory about two decades earlier. Over that period, he had built a sprawling business empire and had become an extremely powerful man in the county. He enlisted men who carried out the killings by poisoning or shooting the victims, or using bombs to blow up their homes. Afterwards, he took over the parcels of land and other property of the deceased, using various schemes that he concocted.

White and his agents were up against an extremely powerful force that even the federal government, with its enormous resources, was having great difficulty confronting. Hale, through his criminal network, had sown such massive fear in the county that no one was willing to talk to the agents. Even some of those who had done the killings and were ready to confess at various points became afraid for their own lives and were thus highly reluctant to cooperate with the investigators. It took a herculean effort, including many stops and starts, to finally take down Hale and his henchmen. They were convicted and sentenced to jail. Even then, some of the murders were never solved.

Throughout that time, the agents themselves were in constant danger of being killed. Hale and his men had become aware of their presence and were doing everything they could to eliminate them before they could uncover the crimes. A number of the people who were assisting in the investigations were indeed murdered. They left behind wives and young children. Grann wrote that “It [takes] enormous courage and virtue to risk your life in order to protect society.”

It is quite heartbreaking to see current FBI agents, who have spent decades taking enormous personal risks, and putting their families through danger along the way, being treated in such a cavalier manner by President Trump and his close allies. Those men and women in the agency deserve a lot better. It is highly doubtful that anyone can plausibly claim that the corruption at the FBI, as alleged by the president and his supporters, was so widespread that the indiscriminate firings and forced resignations are justifiable.

As Grann masterfully illustrated in his book, some FBI personnel are called special agents for some reason. It takes some unique personal qualities to do that job. As the careless gutting of the agency continues, the risk is that morale will sink so low that soon, the FBI, as we’ve known it since the days of J. Edgar Hoover, will cease to exist.

The country seems to be taking it for granted that if that were to occur, we could easily find the right types of new men and women to reconstitute the bureau. We assume that at our peril. Hoover was quite fortunate to find Tom White. White brought decades of law enforcement experience from having operated in an environment that equipped him with the skills required for the Osage murder investigations. The people who are now being fired or forced to resign have similarly acquired decades of invaluable knowledge and experience in crime-fighting in a variety of settings. With the way things are going, there may be few agents left to train the new people—if we could find them.

Many of the people in this new administration are extremely wealthy. The type of fear that the Osage had to live with for decades, as they were terrorized by William Hale and his gang of killers, is something that these moneyed people in today’s Washington don’t have to worry about. In fact, if crime were to explode on planet Earth because of a law-and-order breakdown, some of these billionaires might even leave us here to the wolves and fly themselves and their families to Mars or somewhere safe. We shouldn’t allow them to endanger our lives so recklessly.