Trump’s DOGE Cuts Slashed Staff That Handled Middle Eastern Oil and Gas Crises

Six months before the Trump administration started bombing Iran, the Department of State fired its oil and gas experts.

As the war in Iran stretches into its third week, and the Strait of Hormuz — through which 20% of the world’s oil supply usually flows — remains effectively closed, the U.S. government is without the resources it once had to handle such crises, former State Department employees tell NOTUS.

In July 2025, as part of President Donald Trump’s reduction-in-force initiative, the administration laid off staff who would have been responsible for gaming out possible scenarios if the Strait of Hormuz was closed.

The agency also let go of staffers with close professional relationships at oil and gas companies in the Middle East and experts tasked with maintaining diplomatic contacts at foreign energy bureaus.

“I’m sure Secretary Rubio wishes he had that expertise available today,” said Geoffrey Pyatt, who served as assistant secretary of state for energy resources during the Biden administration. “Most of that institutional knowledge was lost with the elimination of the bureau and RIFs last fall.”

When 1,300 people working at the State Department were cut last summer, the only people left from the agency’s Bureau of Energy Resources were those who worked on critical minerals and clean energy, the administration told Congress when notifying lawmakers of the RIFs.

In a statement, the Department of State told NOTUS’ that the Bureau of Economic, Energy, and Business Affairs “is coordinating the release of strategic reserves with allies and partners in response to Iran’s attacks, driving increased exploration and production with U.S. companies in key theaters globally, especially in Central Asia, Africa, and the Western Hemisphere including Venezuela, and hosting the Secretary’s historic Critical Minerals Ministerial earlier this year with 55 international delegations in one of the largest ministerials at the State Department.”

NOTUS spoke with nine former oil and gas experts across the State Department, the Treasury Department, Energy Department and the National Security Council, all of whom were either laid off by the Trump administration or left their respective agencies within the last six months.

All nine oil and gas experts, granted anonymity to speak without the authorization of their current employers and because of their ties to family members and friends still at the agency, told NOTUS that they believe the Trump administration’s lack of preparation for a global oil crisis is becoming increasingly clear.

With nowhere to send or store their oil and gas, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Kuwait and Qatar have started to slow, and in some cases, entirely halt production.

Iran has also retaliated against U.S. and Israeli strikes by attacking oil and gas infrastructure in the Gulf region, including storage and production facilities. This has forced some of the world’s largest oil producers to contend with extraordinary new risks and increased fear about oil supply.

Trump said those strikes were unexpected.

“They weren’t supposed to go after all these other countries in the Middle East. Those missiles were set to go after them. So they hit Qatar, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Bahrain, Kuwait. Nobody expected that,” the president said on Monday.

The former staffers say previous administrations used to prepare for these exact scenarios.

“Before any of this should have happened, there should have been discussion about what are the implications of this, and what happens when the Strait of Hormuz turns off,” said one former Bureau of Energy Resources staffer.

The State Department’s energy bureau used to model the risks to infrastructure in the region, three former officials said. They would have estimated how long countries like Qatar and the United Arab Emirates could go before they started having to reduce oil and gas production, and they would measure the value of backup plans, such as the oil pipeline that stretches across Saudi Arabia.

Globally, oil and gas companies no longer have an obvious diplomatic point of contact in the Trump administration to communicate problems with, nearly all of the former staff interviewed for this story said. Five of these former staffers now work for oil and gas companies or their lobbyists and related firms.

The Bureau of Energy Resources also fired its sole expert in tracking sanctioned oil tankers, as well as the person primarily tasked with liaising with the International Energy Agency, which coordinates releases from world’s petroleum reserves in times of crisis.

And it’s not just that the State Department eliminated its energy bureau. Across many of the agencies that play a role in navigating a war or a global energy catastrophe, former staffers who left the administration within the last few months and remain in contact with current officials told NOTUS that the Trump administration has sidelined people with expertise.

The usual process of analyzing, reporting and debating before decisions are made all but ceased, said three people who quit their positions at the National Security Council the Treasury and the DOE in the last six months. Before the Trump administration, those three agencies, alongside the State Department, would have engaged in a robust interagency debate about how to handle a global oil crisis like the one currently unfolding in the Middle East.

“You dismantled the framework that any other administration would have used to engage on these very issues,” one former State Department energy official said. “In a normally functioning administration, I don’t know that we would have gotten here, because there would have been a process that would have examined the derivative, second-order and third-order effects. You probably would have had a lot more forethought that would have gone into this situation.”

In group chats that include both current and former staff, federal employees have sent out calls for help with tasks that were once the purview of the federal energy experts, multiple former staffers said.

In one case, a federal employee asked for help finding a contact to deal with energy infrastructure problems in Ukraine. In another case, a federal worker had failed to find the appropriate oil and gas contact for a meeting in the Middle East.

“There was never any handover or transition. There was no formal handover of contacts or anything like that. We were all just let go,” one former State Department energy official said.

Another former State Department energy official described how their former contact at a large oil company approached them after they left the agency to complain about how the company no longer had anyone they could contact at State.

A Treasury employee who quit their job at the agency said that before they departed, oil, gas and maritime executives repeatedly asked for contacts in the administration because they were left without a new point person after the layoffs at the State Department.

“They would say, ‘Who do we call at State about this?’ And I’d say, ‘Sounds like you need to hire some MAGA lobbyists to figure that out, because that’s not my problem. They fired those people,” this former federal worker said.

When the State Department laid off its oil and gas experts, many of them were told that the other three agencies, especially the DOE’s international affairs office, would take over their roles and fill whatever gaps were left behind.

Staffers who remained at other agencies after the State Department energy experts were fired in July told NOTUS that the transition did not happen.

“We never did the kind of work that ENR did. We didn’t do direct sanctions, we never did a whole lot of outreach to industry. They are not necessarily having the time to be market experts and reach out to companies and come up with real policy,” one former DOE staffer said.

“But maybe in this administration, that doesn’t matter. Even if it existed, it wouldn’t mean anything at the end of the day,” they added.

The Department of Energy did not respond to a request for comment.