WASHINGTON, D.C. — The US State Department cut more than 80 staff members from its Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs and merged its standalone Iran office into the Iraq office before the February 28 outbreak of the US-Israel-Iran war, according to figures compiled by a terminated State Department employee and confirmed by reporting from AP News and The Washington Post.
The staffing hollowing-out is now colliding directly with a live crisis. Veteran diplomats with decades of combined experience — including fluent Arabic and Farsi speakers — were fired, retired, or reassigned and replaced by more junior officials or political appointees, current and former officials said. Meanwhile, the administration’s most recent budget had proposed a 40% cut to the Near Eastern Affairs bureau, though Congress ultimately enacted a less severe reduction.
The groups hit hardest stretch beyond the bureau itself. Consular Affairs — the division responsible for evacuating American citizens — saw more than 150 positions eliminated under the Trump administration’s workforce reductions, retirements, and dismissals of provisional employees, according to a senior US official who requested anonymity. A quarter of the entire foreign service has either resigned, retired, had their agencies dismantled, or been removed since January 2025, according to a December 2025 report by the American Foreign Service Association.
Iran Office Dissolution Compounds the Crisis
The overlooked detail buried deep in mainstream coverage: a State Department division within its counterterrorism office that specifically managed programs to counter Iran-linked terrorism was also quietly dismantled during last year’s agency reorganization. Its civil servants were laid off, and the work was transferred to a newly created entity now staffed largely by contractors with limited experience in Iran affairs, according to a former State Department official. That institutional memory — built over years of human intelligence, regional relationship-building, and classified threat analysis — is not easily reconstructable.
Documents reviewed by reporters and published by AP News and The Washington Post further reveal that more than 250 Foreign Service officers, still technically on the State Department‘s payroll after being included in last year’s reduction-in-force, were recently asked to volunteer back — to work on either a crisis task force or any emergency role available. The fact that the department had to call back people it had just fired to manage an active war speaks to the scale of the capability gap now on display.
Americans Stranded While Task Forces Scramble
In Washington, the department stood up two emergency task forces after February 28 — one to bolster Near Eastern Affairs and a second to support Consular Affairs in evacuating American citizens. Officials claim more than 70,000 Americans have returned home since hostilities began, with over 60 charter flights arranged. Principal Deputy Spokesperson Tommy Pigott pushed back on the criticism: “staffing reductions are not having any negative impact on our ability to respond to this operation.”
But several former State officials who offered to help with consular work after the war erupted said they either received no response at all or were told flatly there were “no opportunities” for those laid off — contradicting the department’s later claim of a robust volunteer program, according to emails reviewed by CNN.
The American Foreign Service Association argued in public statements last week that the department has been structurally weakened by the loss of personnel with “regional, managerial, consular, and Farsi-speaking expertise” — skills AFSA described as essential precisely in moments like this. Representative Gregory Meeks, the ranking member on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told reporters bluntly: “There was always going to be a cost to the shortsighted dismantling of the State Department.”
The Predictability Problem
What no outlet is foregrounding clearly enough: former officials assert that Iranian retaliation on US allies was not a surprise. Previous wargames and conflict models run by both the US military and private organizations had flagged this exact escalation scenario. The National Security Council, which President Trump has also significantly downsized, would normally have presented the president with expert analysis from within the bureaucracy before any strike decision.
The Lawfare Institute noted separately that the administration has “decimated” national security elements across multiple agencies — removing people with decades of experience building interagency relationships and handling high-pressure, classified-level crises. As of March 2026, CISA, the cybersecurity agency, is reportedly operating at just 38% of its staff capacity, after a series of cuts that slashed its budget proposal from $3.0 billion to $2.4 billion and its workforce from 4,021 to 2,649 positions. The parallel weakening of homeland security infrastructure adds a second layer of exposure as the Iran conflict widens.
The department has not released official staffing numbers and did not dispute the 80-staffer figure when approached for comment. What remains unconfirmed — and what at least two officials declined to address on the record — is exactly how many of the 250 volunteers who responded to the call-back request have actually been cleared to return and in what capacity.
