DOGE Cuts Left U.S. Unable to Help Americans Stranded in Iran War Zone

When the U.S. and Israel launched their war on Iran, it put as many as 1 million Americans living in the Middle East at risk. Many found themselves stranded in an expanding war zone by a government without a plan, much less the personnel and expertise, to rescue them.

That’s because the Trump administration fired hundreds of key State Department personnel with the skills needed to safeguard U.S. citizens abroad and usher them from harm’s way, lawmakers say. These foreign service officers — who lost their jobs amid Elon Musk’s purge of the federal workforce — contacted members of Congress last month with dire warnings about the department’s inability to manage the ongoing crisis.

“The Department is actively preventing experienced, cleared, available officers from helping American citizens in crisis,” a group of nearly 250 mostly mid-career and senior State Department foreign service officers wrote in a letter sent to lawmakers that was shared exclusively with The Intercept. “The crisis now unfolding in the Middle East is, in part, a foreseeable consequence of this and other short-sighted decisions taken by this administration to undermine the federal bureaucracy by eliminating expertise and politicizing our apolitical workforce.”

They added: “The expertise required to manage the current crisis has been systematically removed.”