The Pentagon spent months preparing to strike Iran. Nobody, it appears, spent much time working out how to get American civilians out of the blast radius.
A group of nearly 250 foreign service officers fired during last year's federal workforce reduction has now put that failure in writing. In a letter obtained by The Intercept, the officers accused the Trump administration of gutting the very expertise needed to protect up to one million Americans living across the Middle East.
'The expertise required to manage the current crisis has been systematically removed,' they wrote.
The officers lost their jobs on 11 July 2025, when the State Department terminated more than 1,300 employees in a reduction-in-force directed by the Department of Government Efficiency. In total, the department has shed over 3,800 staff since Trump took office, the Associated Press reported.
The Bureau of Consular Affairs, the arm of the department tasked with protecting citizens overseas, lost more than 150 positions. Its entire rapid-response consular officer team was eliminated. Among those terminated were 13 Arabic speakers and four Farsi speakers whose language training alone cost taxpayers roughly $200,000 (£151,000) each.
Volunteers With Top Secret Clearances Turned Away
Many of these officers still technically work for the government. Their separation paperwork has not been processed. They retain active security clearances. When war broke out, they offered to come back. The State Department said no.
On 5 March, a former member of the rapid-response team volunteered for the Middle East consular task force and was told there were 'no opportunities' for officers affected by the July layoffs, according to the letter. Foreign Policy reported separately that officers who tried to help were redirected to a rarely monitored email inbox that went unanswered for days.
The sidelined group includes officers who ran evacuations from Afghanistan, Ukraine, and the 2006 Lebanon crisis. One officer alone processed more than 34,000 Afghan evacuees.
'The U.S. Government is not trimming fat. It amputated capability, and Americans are now paying the price,' the officers wrote.
No Evacuation Plan Despite Months of Military Planning
Joint Chiefs Chair Gen. Dan Caine described Operation Epic Fury as 'the culmination of months, and in some cases, years, of deliberate planning.' President Trump, when asked days later why there was no plan for American civilians, said, 'it all happened very quickly.'
The US and Israel struck Iran on 28 February. The State Department did not tell Americans to leave until 2 March. When US Secretary of State Marco Rubio directed citizens to a government hotline the following day, callers got a recording telling them not to rely on the US government for evacuation.
The entire Massachusetts congressional delegation, led by Senator Elizabeth Warren, wrote to Rubio on 5 March demanding answers. More than five weeks on, the State Department has not replied. Warren told The Intercept that Rubio's decision to purge experienced staff 'has threatened our national security and put US citizens in danger.'
The leadership vacuum runs deep. As of March, the US had no confirmed ambassadors in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Egypt, Kuwait, Algeria, Libya, or Iraq. The assistant secretary overseeing Near Eastern Affairs remains unfilled, four of the bureau's five supervisors hold temporary titles, and the dedicated Iran office was merged with the Iraq desk, the AP reported.
The State Department has pushed back, saying the layoffs had 'no negative impact' on its crisis response. It has since organised more than 60 charter and military flights and says over 70,000 Americans have returned from the region.
Senator Jeanne Shaheen, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was not reassured. The loss of experienced personnel, she said, 'has clearly undermined the Bureau of Consular Affairs' ability to fulfil its most important mission - to protect Americans abroad.'
