{"id":27239,"date":"2026-03-19T21:12:11","date_gmt":"2026-03-19T21:12:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/27239\/"},"modified":"2026-03-19T21:12:11","modified_gmt":"2026-03-19T21:12:11","slug":"as-iran-war-expands-thinned-state-department-struggles-to-keep-up","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/27239\/","title":{"rendered":"As Iran war expands, thinned State Department struggles to keep up"},"content":{"rendered":"

WASHINGTON (AP) \u2014 In the escalating war in Iran, the State Department\u2019s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs<\/a> would ordinarily be at the center of the geopolitical fray.<\/p>\n

Typically led by a veteran diplomat, the bureau\u2019s 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<\/a> as the U.S. and Israel remain locked in conflict with Iran. <\/p>\n

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\u2019s blueprint for the second Trump administration. Namdar\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Now that bureau is also working with far fewer resources. The administration\u2019s most recent budget<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

Staff reductions and management choices hamper emergency response<\/p>\n

These kinds of personnel and management choices \u2014 coupled with President Donald Trump\u2019s moves to shrink government and confine decision-making to a tight circle \u2014 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.<\/p>\n

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 \u2014 replaced by more junior officials or political appointees. The administration cut more than 80 staffers<\/a> 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.)<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s agenda. Those who remain tell colleagues that their analyses, recommendations and advice go unheeded. <\/p>\n

The State Department vigorously disputed those assessments.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs far as we can tell, AP\u2019s entire \u2018report\u2019 on the evacuations does not include any conversations with people actually involved. Instead, it relies on \u2018outside\u2019 or \u2018former official\u2019 sources that have no idea what they are talking about. We walked AP through specific inaccuracy after specific inaccuracy \u2014 indeed how the whole premise was wrong,\u201d State Department spokesman Tommy Pigott said. <\/p>\n

More than 3,800 State Dept. employees departed since Trump took office<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe\u2019s making choices without the larger expertise of the United States government that would flag issues of consequence,\u201d said Max Stier, CEO of the nonpartisan Partnership for Public Service, a nonprofit group that studies federal workforce issues. \u201cSometimes government is slow-moving because there are a lot of different factors that need to be balanced against each other.\u201d<\/p>\n

For instance, the administration appears to have been caught off guard by what would happen once the U.S. struck Iran \u2014 something Trump himself acknowledged this week when he expressed surprise that Tehran retaliated with strikes on American allies in the region. \u201cNobody expected that. We were shocked. They fought back,\u201d Trump told reporters this week.<\/p>\n

Pigott said staffing reductions \u201care 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.\u201d He added that the department \u201crejects the premise that key decisions were made without meaningful input from experienced professionals.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s national security adviser.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn 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,\u201d White House spokesperson Dylan Johnson said.<\/p>\n

Advice from career officials often went unheeded<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the time that I was there, there was no policy process to speak of,\u201d 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. <\/p>\n

\u201cThey did not want to hear any advice from career people,\u201d said Backemeyer. <\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

When the U.S. made the decision to strike Iran, Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee offered embassy staff in Jerusalem the opportunity to evacuate \u2014 a sign that he knew strikes were coming. But some other embassies in the region did not make similar arrangements \u2014 leaving nonessential personnel and their families stranded in a war zone.<\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

Evacuation planning was chaotic<\/p>\n

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 \u2014 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\u2019s own remarks.<\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

\u201cThe messaging that went out to American citizens \u2014 after the U.S. struck Iran \u2014 was woefully late and, initially, confusing,\u201d Yael Lempert, who served as U.S. ambassador to Jordan until 2025 told the AP. Lempert was one of five former ambassadors who spoke Thursday about the department\u2019s failures at an event hosted by the American Academy of Diplomacy in Washington. <\/p>\n

\u201cThey failed to anticipate that Iran would respond to asymmetrically by attacking U.S. government diplomatic facilities and personnel and the wider U.S. American community in the region,\u201d said John Bass, who was the ambassador to Afghanistan during Trump\u2019s first term. <\/p>\n

\u201cIf you go back and look at the history of U.S. foreign policy and national security mistakes, including a number of the mistakes that President Trump has identified as core mistakes in the last 25 years, you will see that they often resulted from deficits in the decision making process, where leadership did not have access to the best information and to a wide range of views,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n

Other poorly executed evacuations, such the Biden administration\u2019s withdrawal from Afghanistan, have drawn criticism. <\/p>\n

But this time they\u2019re 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 \u2014 though other parts of the department were hit much harder.<\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

Democrat says personnel reduction imperiled safety<\/p>\n

\u201cThe loss of experienced personnel through these RIFs has clearly undermined the Bureau of Consular Affairs\u2019 ability to fulfill its most important mission, to protect Americans abroad,\u201d Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said in a statement. <\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

A group of more than 250 Foreign Service officers were part of the administration\u2019s reduction-in-force last year but still remain on the State Department\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cI haven\u2019t 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,\u201d said one foreign service officer who asked for anonymity because they are still technically on the department\u2019s payroll and are not authorized to speak to the press. \u201cI will do the scutwork jobs.\u201d<\/p>\n

The department hasn\u2019t responded to their offer but said in a statement that the task force is \u201cfully staffed.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"WASHINGTON (AP) \u2014 In the escalating war in Iran, the State Department\u2019s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs would…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":27240,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[4732,12756,38,12758,197,1770,34,196,12761,12763,210,12759,12760,81,12762,2438,51,323,771,82,12757],"class_list":{"0":"post-27239","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-iran","8":"tag-ap-investigations","9":"tag-chris-backemeyer","10":"tag-donald-trump","11":"tag-dylan-johnson","12":"tag-general-news","13":"tag-government-and-politics","14":"tag-iran","15":"tag-iran-war","16":"tag-jeanne-shaheen","17":"tag-john-bass","18":"tag-marco-rubio","19":"tag-max-stier","20":"tag-mike-huckabee","21":"tag-politics","22":"tag-tommy-pigott","23":"tag-u-s-department-of-state","24":"tag-united-states","25":"tag-united-states-government","26":"tag-washington-news","27":"tag-world-news","28":"tag-yael-lempert"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@iran\/116257905363662864","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27239","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27239"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27239\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/27240"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27239"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27239"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27239"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}