the edit, vol. 26

the war they didn't prepare for — what doge actually cut

when the bombs fell on tehran on february 28, the state department's emergency hotline for americans in the middle east played a recorded message.

it said: "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."

half a million american citizens were in the region. airports were closed. iranian missiles were landing in the uae, bahrain, and saudi arabia. the u.s. embassy in kuwait had just been struck by a drone. and the government that had launched the war could not tell its own citizens how to get out of it.

trump's explanation, when pressed: "it happened all very quickly."

the question this piece is about isn't whether the war was right or wrong. it's about something more specific — and more verifiable. the government did not fail to prepare because the situation moved too fast. it failed to prepare because the people whose job was preparation had been fired.

six months before the bombs, the experts were let go

in july 2025, as part of the trump administration's reduction-in-force initiative, the state department fired its oil and gas experts.

the bureau of energy resources had spent years modeling scenarios exactly like the one that began on february 28 — what happens if the strait of hormuz closes, how long qatar and the uae can sustain production, which backup pipelines exist, which foreign energy bureaus are the key diplomatic contacts in a crisis. those models lived in the heads of people who are no longer employed by the u.s. government.

"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," one former bureau of energy resources staffer told notus. "there was never any handover or transition. we were all just let go."

the bureau also fired its sole expert in tracking sanctioned oil tankers. it fired the person primarily responsible for liaising with the international energy agency — the body that coordinates releases from the world's petroleum reserves in times of crisis. oil and gas companies operating across the middle east now have no obvious diplomatic point of contact in the trump administration to communicate problems with.

this is not an abstract policy failure. the strait of hormuz carries roughly 20% of the world's oil supply. it is now inside an active conflict zone. brent crude is at $103. and the government that made the decision to bomb iran did not have the staff to model what that decision would do to global energy markets — because it had fired them.

the cyber defenders who were told to go home

the state department was not the only agency gutted before the war it would need to fight.

in february and march of 2025, doge terminated more than 130 employees at the cybersecurity and infrastructure security agency — the federal government's primary institution for defending critical infrastructure against foreign attack. the cuts included the agency's red teams: the specialists whose job is to find vulnerabilities in power grids, pipelines, and water systems before adversaries do.

one former cisa employee who had come from naval intelligence described the program she ran: sensors installed across critical infrastructure, continuously monitoring for foreign adversaries moving through networks. "it was all about the information we can get within networks to find the bad guys — any indicators of compromise, evidence of the adversary moving through a network and attempting to do bad things," she told cbs news. she was let go with a form letter saying she was "not fit for continued employment."

former cisa director jen easterly called it a "strategic own goal" — a phrase that understates things considerably. iran and its proxies are not passive actors. the irgc has demonstrated sustained interest in infiltrating u.s. critical infrastructure. volt typhoon and salt typhoon, the chinese cyber operations that had been actively penetrating u.s. networks for years, did not pause their operations because cisa lost 130 people.

a current cisa employee, speaking anonymously to cybersecurity dive, put it plainly: "our capacity to deliver our technical services has been significantly reduced in the past eleven months due to the cuts in programs and contracts, and we have to do more with less."

more with less. that is the phrase the government uses when it does not want to say: we are exposed.

the evacuation plan that didn't exist

the most visible consequence of the staffing failures arrived in the first seventy-two hours of the war — not in the strait of hormuz, but in the form of stranded american citizens.

the state department issued its first evacuation advisory two days after the strikes began. it told the roughly half a million americans in the region to depart "using available commercial transportation." airports were already closed. airspace was already contested. the advisory also reminded people to "have a plan to depart in an emergency that does not depend on u.s. government help."

when people called the state department's own emergency number, a recorded message told them not to call. "the department of state tells me to evacuate, but there's no way to do so," said one american stranded in bahrain. "i cannot believe there is no support for u.s. citizens stranded when the u.s. started this conflict."

rubio, when asked directly whether there had been an evacuation plan in place before the strikes: "well, that's the plan we are trying to carry out."

eventually the state department authorized up to $40 million in emergency funds for charter flights. more than 40,000 americans returned home — the vast majority on commercial flights they arranged themselves. the government's charter flights, when they finally launched, departed with empty seats.

the state department official asked about doge's role in the travel disruptions disputed the connection. but the connection is not speculative. it is documented. the bureau whose job was to prepare for a middle east energy crisis had been reduced. the consular staff whose job was to maintain departure routes for american citizens had been thinned. when the crisis arrived, what remained was insufficient — and the people who knew that best were no longer inside the building.

efficiency as a theory; cost as the reality

doge claimed, at various points, to have saved $150 billion, then $206 billion, then figures that budget experts said did not add up and could not be independently verified. the irs alone is projected to lose more than $500 billion in revenue collection capacity because of staffing cuts. the federal deficit grew by $76 billion more in fiscal 2025 than in fiscal 2024 — even as doge claimed to be cutting spending.

this is the part that gets lost in the political argument about government size. the case for cutting government is often made in the abstract: the federal government is bloated, inefficient, full of redundancy. that case may have merit in some corners of the bureaucracy. it has very little merit when applied to the people whose specific job is to model the consequences of a war before you start it, or to find the foreign adversaries already inside your power grid.

the cuts were not surgical. the federal civilian workforce shrank by roughly 9% in 2025 — more than 200,000 people. every cabinet department is smaller. the department of education lost 69% of its staff. housing and urban development lost 40%. and across many agencies, the cuts came before congress had finalized appropriations, before any transparency about where they were landing, and without the handover of institutional knowledge that would allow the remaining staff to do the work the departed staff had done.

a former national security council official told notus that "the usual process of analyzing, reporting and debating before decisions are made all but ceased" in the months before the iran war. in group chats mixing current and former staff, federal employees were sending out calls for help finding basic contacts — who is the right person at this oil company, who is the liaison for energy infrastructure in this region.

"there was no formal handover of contacts or anything like that," said one former state department energy official. "we were all just let go."

what accountability looks like here

the iran war will be argued about for years — whether it was justified, whether it was legal, whether it achieved its objectives. those are real and unresolved questions.

but beneath those questions is a simpler one that is answerable right now: did the government that chose to go to war do the basic work of preparing for its consequences?

the evidence is fairly clear. it did not. the people paid to model an energy crisis were let go six months before the energy crisis arrived. the people paid to defend critical infrastructure from foreign cyber retaliation were fired with form letters. the consular staff paid to maintain evacuation routes for american citizens were thinned before the war that would require those routes.

when the consequences arrived — stranded citizens, a closed strait, cyber vulnerabilities that remain classified — the administration described each one as unforeseeable.

but foresight is not a personality trait. it is an institutional function. it lives in the expertise of people who spend years studying a specific problem so that when that problem becomes a crisis, there is someone in the building who already understands it.

those people were the "waste" that was cut.

the recorded message that played on the state department emergency line on the first day of the war — please do not rely on the u.s. government — was not an accident or an oversight.

it was an accurate description of what the government, as it had been redesigned, was now capable of providing.