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.
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.
But now that bureau is also working with 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.
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.
Veteran diplomats with decades of collective experience have been 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.
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.
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.
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 layoffs.
“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.”
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.”
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 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 recently left government to run for Congress as a Democrat in Nebraska.
“They did not want to hear any advice from career people,” Backemeyer said.
“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,” said Dylan Johnson, a White House spokesman.
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.
“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.
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.
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