Admin Cut Jobs With Mid-East Expertise 03/19 06:21

   

   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.

   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."