Security Admin On A Server With NO Public Permissions

I am working with a SQLServer installation where all public permissions
have been revoked from the system.

I currently hold the securityadmin and sysadmin roles to perform my
logicall access control work (creating logins and adding users to
databases and changing group memberships.)

There has been a question as to whether or not I need the sysadmin role
to do my job, so we tried an experiment in dropping the sysadmin role
from my id.

With no public permissions, I see no user information on the server,
which really limits my ability to do the job.

Has anyone ever worked with a super-locked-down server without the
sysadmin role for doing security admin work?

What I'm looking for is hopefully SQL to perform the access privileges
needed for the security admin role by itself.

Thanks in advance!