In the escalating war involving Iran, the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs—an office that typically coordinates U.S. foreign policy across an 18-country region—has been operating under strain, according to current and former U.S. officials who described how workforce reductions and management changes are complicating crisis response. Those officials said career expertise has been displaced by more junior officials and political appointees, with veterans fired, retired or reassigned, and that recommendations and advice from remaining career staff sometimes go unheeded.
Several of the management decisions described in the report point to how the bureau’s capacity shifted during the Trump administration. The account said the administration proposed a 40% cut to Near Eastern Affairs and later enacted less dramatic cuts with Congress, and also eliminated the dedicated Iran office by merging it with the Iraq office. It also said the administration moved lawyer Mora Namdar into leadership before later shifting her to another post, and highlighted that one credential cited for Namdar was her work connected to Project 2025.
The current and former officials described a bureau with a leadership gap and incomplete staffing at the top, saying the assistant secretary position overseeing Near Eastern Affairs remained vacant and that four of the five supervisors held temporary titles. They said that in divisions that typically handle the Iran response, experienced diplomats with decades of collective experience were removed—replaced with younger officials or political appointees—leaving the bureau with a thinner bench as the conflict expanded across the region.
The State Department disputed that characterization. In response, spokesman Tommy Pigott said the department challenged AP’s depiction of its evacuations, adding that “As far as we can tell, AP’s entire ‘report’ on the evacuations does not include any conversations with people actually involved,” and that AP relied on “outside” or “former official” sources who “have no idea what they are talking about.” Pigott also said the department walked AP through “specific inaccuracy after specific inaccuracy,” and said the department rejected the premise that key decisions were made without meaningful input from experienced professionals.
The officials who criticized the department also connected the staffing changes to broader shifts in how decisions get made during the crisis, saying President Donald Trump’s approach to shrink government and confine decision-making to a tight circle limited the ability to execute a global emergency. They said the Trump administration pared back processes and expertise that would normally come from the larger government machinery, including analysis that the National Security Council typically would provide, and they said decisions are made by a small group close to the president.
The report also described how evacuations were carried out after U.S. strikes against Iran, with officials arguing that planning was slow. Former officials said the administration appears to have underestimated what would happen once the U.S. struck Iran, pointing to Trump’s comments that he was surprised by retaliation against American allies. In that dispute over timing, the officials said the State Department began pushing Americans to leave only after Iranian attacks on allies such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, and that planning should have started earlier.
Yael Lempert, a former ambassador to Jordan who spoke at an event hosted by the American Academy of Diplomacy in Washington, said, “The messaging that went out to American citizens — after the U.S. struck Iran — was woefully late and, initially, confusing.” John Bass, who served as ambassador to Afghanistan during Trump’s first term, said, “They 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,” and added that mistakes in past U.S. foreign-policy and national-security efforts 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.”
The report said one factor in the evacuation effort was inconsistency across posts: it cited an example in which Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee offered embassy staff in Jerusalem the opportunity to evacuate ahead of anticipated strikes, while other embassies did not make similar arrangements, leaving some nonessential personnel and their families in places that became war zones. The State Department said it has issued travel warnings since January and said it was fully staffed to handle the crisis once the strikes began, and it said it has offered assistance to nearly 50,000 Americans impacted, with more than 60 flights evacuating citizens from the region and more than 70,000 Americans able to return home since hostilities broke out on Feb. 28.
In Congress, Democrats argued that the staffing changes reduced safety. Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said in a statement, “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.” The report also said language capacity at the department had been affected, with a draft letter being circulated by former foreign service officers saying that 13 Arabic speakers and four Farsi speakers, all trained at taxpayer expense, were among employees let go, and it reported estimates tied to training costs for foreign service officers.
The State Department said it has set up two temporary task forces to deal with the crisis in the Middle East, including one aimed at bolstering the Near East Affairs bureau and another focused on helping Consular Affairs evacuate Americans. The report also said that some Foreign Service officers who remained on the department’s payroll after a reduction-in-force last year volunteered to return during the crisis, with one officer who asked for anonymity saying they were still eligible to work and could “go back to the department tomorrow,” though the department did not respond to their offer and said the relevant task force is “fully staffed.”