State Department cut jobs with deep expertise in Middle East as Iran
crisis escalates
[March 19, 2026]
By BYRON TAU
WASHINGTON (AP) — In the escalating war in Iran, the State Department’s
Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs would ordinarily be at the center of the
geopolitical fray.
Typically led by a veteran diplomat, the bureau’s role would be to
coordinate U.S. foreign policy across an 18-country region, much of
which has become a chaotic battlefield scarred by drone and missile
strikes as the U.S. and Israel remain locked in conflict with Iran.
The Trump administration for a time put Mora Namdar, a lawyer of Iranian
descent with limited management experience, in charge before later
moving her to a different post. One of her credentials was her
contribution to Project 2025, a conservative think tank’s blueprint for
the second Trump administration. Namdar’s last Senate-confirmed
predecessor was a longtime Middle East expert who had been with the
department since 1984 and had served as the U.S. ambassador to the
United Arab Emirates.
Now that bureau is also working with far fewer resources. The
administration’s most recent budget proposed a 40% cut to the bureau,
though Congress eventually enacted less dramatic cuts. The
administration also eliminated the dedicated Iran office, merging it
with the Iraq office.
Staff reductions and management choices hamper emergency response
These kinds of personnel and management choices — coupled with President
Donald Trump's moves to shrink government and confine decision-making to
a tight circle — are limiting the ability of the United States to handle
a global emergency, according to interviews with more than a dozen
current and former U.S. officials, many of whom recently left
government.
In divisions of the State Department that typically would handle the
Iran response, numerous veteran diplomats with decades of collective
experience were fired, retired or were reassigned — replaced by more
junior officials or political appointees. The administration cut more
than 80 staffers in Near Eastern Affairs, according to numbers compiled
by a State Department employee who was terminated last year based on
surveys of colleagues. (The department does not release official figures
on Foreign Service officer staffing levels but did not dispute the
number.)
The Trump administration has left the assistant secretary position in
charge of Near Eastern Affairs vacant, along with key ambassadorships in
the Middle East. Four of the five supervisors in the bureau have
temporary titles.
The current and former officials, some of whom asked for anonymity to
discuss sensitive internal matters during an active conflict, paint a
portrait of an understaffed government workforce struggling to execute
the president’s agenda. Those who remain tell colleagues that their
analysis, recommendations and advice go unheeded.
The State Department vigorously disputed those assessments.
“As far as we can tell, AP’s entire ‘report’ on the evacuations does not
include any conversations with people actually involved. Instead, it
relies on ‘outside’ or ‘former official’ sources that have no idea what
they are talking about. We walked AP through specific inaccuracy after
specific inaccuracy — indeed how the whole premise was wrong," State
Department spokesman Tommy Pigott said.
More than 3,800 State Dept. employees departed since Trump took
office
The State Department saw a departure of more than 3,800 employees since
Trump took office through a combination of reductions in force, staffers
taking the Fork in the Road deferred resignation plan and ordinary
retirements. According to estimates by the American Foreign Service
Association, the labor union that represents foreign service officers,
senior foreign service ranks were disproportionately represented in the
layoffs compared to their share of the overall workforce.
“He’s making choices without the larger expertise of the United States
government that would flag issues of consequence,” said Max Stier, CEO
of the nonpartisan Partnership for Public Service, a nonprofit group
that studies federal workforce issues. “Sometimes government is
slow-moving because there are a lot of different factors that need to be
balanced against each other.”
For instance, the administration appears to have been caught off guard
by what would happen once the U.S. struck Iran — something Trump himself
acknowledged this week when he expressed surprise that Tehran retaliated
with strikes on American allies in the region. “Nobody expected that. We
were shocked. They fought back,” Trump told reporters this week.
Pigott said staffing reductions “are not having any negative impact on
our ability to respond to this operation, our ability to plan, and our
ability to execute in service to Americans.” He added that the
department “rejects the premise that key decisions were made without
meaningful input from experienced professionals.”
But Iranian retaliation on U.S. allies was predictable, according to
former officials, as well as previous wargames and conflict models run
by both the U.S. military and private organizations. The National
Security Council, which Trump has pared, typically would have presented
the president with analysis from experts within the bureaucracy.
Instead, decisions are made by a small group of officials close to the
president without the planning or coordination of the larger machinery
of government, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who also serves
as the president's national security adviser.
“In the Trump Administration, decisions are made by President Trump and
senior administration officials and not by no-name bureaucrat leakers
who whine to the press about not being consulted about highly classified
operations,” White House spokesperson Dylan Johnson said.
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Secretary of State Marco Rubio speaks during a U.S. Hostage and
Wrongful Detainee Flag Raising ceremony at the State Department,
Monday, March 9, 2026 in Washington. (AP Photo/Kevin Wolf)
Advice from career officials often went unheeded
“In the time that I was there, there was no policy process to speak
of,” said Chris Backemeyer, who served in Near Eastern Affairs as a
deputy assistant secretary of state before resigning last year.
Backemeyer was a major proponent of the Iran deal that Trump
abandoned. He recently left government to run for Congress as a
Democrat in Nebraska.
“They did not want to hear any advice from career people,” said
Backemeyer.
Namdar was later moved to be the head of consular affairs, the part
of the department responsible for providing assistance to American
citizens overseas and issuing visas to foreign visitors.
When the U.S. made the decision to strike Iran, Ambassador to Israel
Mike Huckabee offered embassy staff in Jerusalem the opportunity to
evacuate — a sign that he knew strikes were coming. But some other
embassies in the region did not make similar arrangements — leaving
nonessential personnel and their families stranded in a war zone.
The department said it has been issuing travel warnings since
January and was fully staffed to handle the crisis the moment the
strikes were launched.
Evacuation planning was chaotic
Still, little planning appears to have gone into how to evacuate the
Americans who were living, working, visiting or studying in many of
the countries that became engulfed in the conflict — in part because
the White House seems to have underestimated the possibility of the
strikes expanding into a prolonged multi-country war, as evidenced
by Trump's own remarks.
After Iranian attacks on allies like Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the
United Arab Emirates, the State Department began calling for
Americans to leave the region. But numerous former Consular Affairs
staffers say such planning should have begun long before U.S.
strikes started.
In a statement posted to social media, Namdar only told Americans to
evacuate several days into the conflict, when airspace was largely
closed and many commercial flights were unavailable.
“The messaging that went out to American citizens — after the U.S.
struck Iran — was woefully late and, initially, confusing," said
Yael Lempert, who served as U.S. ambassador to Jordan until 2025.
Lempert is one of five former ambassadors expected to speak about
the department's failures at an event Thursday at the American
Academy of Diplomacy in Washington.
Other poorly executed evacuations, such the Biden administration's
withdrawal from Afghanistan, have drawn criticism.
But this time they're compounded by the loss of experienced people,
officials say. Consular Affairs has lost more than 150 jobs in the
Trump administration due to a combination of reductions in force,
dismissals of probationary employees and retirements, according to a
U.S. official who asked for anonymity — though other parts of the
department were hit much harder.
The department notes that it has offered assistance to nearly 50,000
Americans impacted by the conflict, with more than 60 flights
evacuating citizens from the region. In total, the department says
more than 70,000 Americans have been able to return home since the
outbreak of hostilities on Feb. 28.
Democrat says personnel reduction imperiled safety
“The loss of experienced personnel through these RIFs has clearly
undermined the Bureau of Consular Affairs' ability to fulfill its
most important mission, to protect Americans abroad," Sen. Jeanne
Shaheen, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee,
said in a statement.
Language skills at the department are also atrophying. Thirteen
Arabic speakers and four Farsi speakers, all trained at taxpayer
expense, were among employees let go, according to a draft letter
being circulated by former foreign service officers.
It can cost $200,000 to train a foreign service officer in a
language. The letter estimates that the total number of people fired
by the State Department in the name of efficiency received more than
$35 million in taxpayer-funded language training and more than $100
million in total training and other career development.
The State Department has set up two temporary task forces to deal
with the crisis in the Middle East. One aims to bolster the
capacities of Near East Affairs and another is aimed at helping
Consular Affairs evacuate Americans.
A group of more than 250 Foreign Service officers were part of the
administration’s reduction-in-force last year but still remain on
the State Department’s payroll. Many have volunteered to return to
the department to work on either a task force or do any other job
that needs to be done with the outbreak of a global crisis.
“I haven’t been given any separation paperwork. I still have an
active clearance. I could go back to the department tomorrow, either
to backfill or staff a task force,” said one foreign service officer
who asked for anonymity because they are still technically on the
department's payroll and are not authorized to speak to the press.
“I will do the scutwork jobs.”
The department hasn’t responded to their offer but said in a
statement that the task force is “fully staffed.”
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