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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."
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