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.
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.
Lambert here: See, there’s your problem. No robust interagency debate. (Again, we see a liberal organ using “DOGE” in the headline, but not in the body. Yes, DOGE purged State. Did they purge these entities? Where’s the source for that?
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