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The Trump administration purged the State Department of its oil and gas experts last year, prior to launching its war on Iran, including people who would be responsible for examining scenarios related to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, a new report says as the gas prices spike.
NOTUS reports that the administration laid off a wide swath of oil and gas analysts in the State Department’s Bureau of Energy Resources last year, as part of the administration’s Elon Musk-led “Department of Government Efficiency” hack-and-slash initiative.
By the time the layoffs were over, the only people left in the energy bureau were people specializing in critical minerals and clean energy, the administration said in a notification to Congress at the time.
The people laid off included those who would have been responsible for modeling scenarios like Iran’s current closure of the Strait of Hormuz, as well as those who could have helped prepare for Iran’s retaliatory strikes on U.S. and Israeli assets in surrounding countries like Qatar and Saudi Arabia, NOTUS reported.
Trump has said that his administration was “shocked” that Iran retaliated with strikes on other countries in the Middle East, even though advisers had warned him of the possibility.
The layoffs also included staff with professional and diplomatic ties to Middle East oil and gas companies, who would have been able to liaise with those entities amid the war. Even further, the State Department fired the person “primarily tasked with liaising with the International Energy Agency,” the global energy watchdog that helps to coordinate releases from strategic oil reserves.
“I’m sure Secretary Rubio wishes he had that expertise available today,” said Geoffrey Pyatt, former assistant secretary of state for energy resources under the Biden administration, of the layoffs, per NOTUS. “Most of that institutional knowledge was lost with the elimination of the bureau and [the reduction-in-force] last fall.”
The reporting comes in the middle of an oil and gas crisis caused by the war. Oil prices have spiked since the war began on February 28, with crude oil prices up more than 40 percent and gas prices at the pump having risen by nearly a dollar a gallon, undergoing a 27 percent rise between mid-March and mid-February, the Energy Information Administration reported Tuesday. Jet fuel prices have doubled in many regions, airlines have reported, and those costs will be passed along to consumers.
Oil prices similarly leapt on Wednesday after the U.S. and Israel struck a critical offshore natural gas field, the South Pars field, owned jointly by Iran and Qatar.
In response to the report, the State Department said that it is “coordinating the release of strategic reserves with allies and partners” and trying to spur U.S. companies to increase production.
Experts, however, have said that any such initiatives are just a band aid on the crisis, and that only the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz could ease supply shortages. Ordinarily, about 20 percent of the world’s oil and gas transit moves through the strait every day.
Countries have roundly rejected Trump’s plea to form a naval coalition to help open the strait, leading Trump to change his mind and claim, instead, that “we don’t need any help” anyway.
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