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.”

The situation in the Middle East remains dire, even as a fragile ceasefire between the U.S. and Iran has taken hold following a genocidal threat by President Donald Trump. After Trump teased that he was willing to wipe out Iran’s “whole civilization” earlier this week, the State Department advised American citizens to reconsider travel across the Middle East due to serious risks to safety and security. Days earlier, the department had urged “citizens to depart Lebanon while commercial flight options remain available” and to flee Iraq via “overland routes” due to fears of “widespread attacks against U.S. citizens.”

The FSOs responsible for the letter to lawmakers are among more than 1,300 State Department personnel fired by the Trump administration as part of a purge by Musk’s now-disgraced Department of Government Efficiency last July. Under the rules governing federal employment, they were not immediately terminated but issued reduction-in-force, or RIF, notices, which is the legally prescribed federal procedure for laying off career civil servants.

The Bureau of Consular Affairs, whose top priority is to “protect the lives and serve the interests of American citizens” around the world, was especially hard hit, losing 102 personnel — including the entire rapid-response consular officer team. These FSOs, all with Top Secret clearances and who are still being paid, have indicated their willingness to return to service, and include many with experience in the Middle East, crisis management, evacuation operations, or so-called “active conflict/ordered departure environments,” according to the letter.

President Donald Trump began his war of choice with Iran on February 28, stating its “objective is to defend the American people.” But it wasn’t until March 2 that the State Department put out an alert for U.S. citizens to “DEPART NOW” from Bahrain, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Israel, the West Bank, Gaza, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, the United Arab Emirates, and Yemen “due to serious safety risks.”

Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced on March 3 that stranded Americans should call a State Department hotline for assistance. Those that did were told they were on their own. “Please do not rely on the U.S. government for assisted departure or evacuation. At this time, there are currently no United States evacuation points,” an automated message stated.

The entire Massachusetts congressional delegation, led by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., called out the “failures of the Trump administration and State Department to adequately prepare for the threats to American citizens living in the Middle East” in a March 5 letter and asked Rubio to provide answers to detailed questions about the evacuation failures. A month later, the State Department has yet to reply.

“Secretary Rubio has no answers for the failures on his watch, but these brave public servants paint the clearest picture yet of the damage the Trump administration has wreaked,” Warren told The Intercept. “Rubio recklessly purging hundreds of State Department experts has threatened our national security and put U.S. citizens in danger in the Middle East.”

The State Department did not provide answers to detailed questions from The Intercept about the fired FSOs. Instead, a spokesperson passed along anodyne talking points. “The RIFs did not have any negative impact on our ability to respond to the developments in the Middle East, our ability to plan, or our ability to execute in service to Americans,” she wrote in an email. “There were no RIFs that affected our overseas operations that are working in the field to assist Americans.”

As U.S. citizens scrambled to flee the Middle East last month, nearly 20,000 flights to and from the region were canceled and major travel hubs, including the world’s busiest international airport in Dubai, were shut down for days. Americans found themselves stranded in countries that were quickly engulfed in America’s war, like a family from North Carolina left cowering in a bomb shelter in Jerusalem as missiles exploded outside, and a Philadelphia native living in the United Arab Emirates who described the State Department’s evacuation notices as “absolutely cavalier.”

“I saw in the air missiles and lights and all that and everyone got on their knees and started praying,” Evelyn Mushi, who was transiting through the airport in Abu Dhabi with her 82-year-old mother, told NPR. “I’m just very shocked and upset that I see other nations getting their citizens out and we’re just stranded here.” Stuck in a hotel in Doha, Qatar, Odies Turner, a private chef from South Carolina, told ABC News: “I really don’t know what to do. I’ve reached out to the embassy, consulate and airlines. There’s no information on when I will get back home. It’s a mess.”

The Trump administration claims that it “has no higher priority than the safety and security of Americans worldwide.” But while Gen. Dan Caine, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that Operation Epic Fury was the “culmination of months, and in some cases, years, of deliberate planning,” Trump said the administration had no evacuation plans for Americans abroad because “it all happened very quickly.”

With Americans stranded and endangered, the State Department sat on its hands, the FSOs allege. On March 5, a former member of the Bureau of Consular Affairs’ Rapid Response team with significant crisis management experience volunteered their services but say they were rebuffed. “At this time, there are no opportunities for officers who were subject to the July 2025 RIF to volunteer for the Middle East Consular Task Force,” the FSO was told by the State Department, according to the letter.

The State Department did not reply to repeated questions about why the FSO’s offer was rejected.

Last month, Foreign Policy reported on a letter from John Dinkelman, president of the American Foreign Service Association, to Michael Rigas, State Department deputy secretary for management and resources, in which he noted that many of those fired in July 2025 had offered to assist in the Middle East evacuation effort.

Among the fired FSOs are officers who managed emergency evacuations from Ukraine in 2022; evacuation from Afghanistan — including an officer who led operations responsible for relocating 52,000 Afghans across multiple countries in 2025 and another who processed 8,000 evacuees in under 30 days at a remote site; evacuations from the Middle East during the Arab Spring; the tumult of the Covid-19 pandemic, including an officer who adjudicated tens of thousands of visas from a single overseas post; the 2006 Lebanon evacuation, which was the largest U.S. noncombatant evacuation operation since World War II; and those that managed posts during ordered departures from Bahrain, Ethiopia, and Iraq, among other relevant experience, according to the letter.

One officer who shared their story on the condition of anonymity noted they joined the Foreign Service in the late 2000s, serving in South Asia and the Middle East, among other posts. A speaker of Urdu, Pashto, and Arabic, this FSO was one of those who played a major role in the Afghanistan evacuation, helping to process more than 34,000 Afghans, including 900 American citizens, whose identities and case statuses, such as those who worked with the U.S. military and had special immigrant visas, needed to be verified. “I loved my work and gave it my all,” said the officer. “I was on sick leave when I received an email that I was laid off. Shock can’t describe how I felt.” Others offered similar resumes and disbelief at the dismantling of the Foreign Service by the Trump administration.

“Collectively, members of our group are prepared to staff multiple crisis task force shifts. We have a deep bench of Middle East experts, consular experience, crisis expertise, crisis communications background, and relevant language skills to immediately deploy to help,” wrote the fired FSOs. “The U.S. Government is not trimming fat. It amputated capability, and Americans are now paying the price.”

The July 11, 2025 reduction in force terminated 1,346 State Department employees, including 276 Foreign Service Officers — some of whom were later reinstated to correct purported firing “errors” — as well as 1,070 civil service employees. The Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations alone lost 62 personnel, including a senior stabilization adviser embedded with the military who supported evacuation planning.

The department’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs also lost close to 80 employees between August and December 2025, and the position of the assistant secretary in charge of Near Eastern Affairs remains vacant. The administration’s most recent budget proposed a 40 percent cut to the bureau, although Congress eventually settled on a less dramatic reduction.

The cuts are symptomatic of the hollowing out of the State Department, especially in the Middle East. As of March, the United States had no confirmed ambassadors in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Egypt, Kuwait, Algeria, Libya, or Iraq. Career ambassadors to Qatar, Kuwait, Egypt, and Algeria were also dismissed without replacement. The State Department did not respond to a request to confirm that all those positions remain open, nor did the press office address how the lack of leadership in so many key countries has affected diplomatic efforts in the Middle East.