They Fired the War-Gamers. Then the War Started.

Corruption of Power GriftMatrix

DOGE cut the State Department’s entire Middle East oil team six months before the Strait of Hormuz closed.

Could the Trump admin be any more inept?

Oh, hell yeah.

You know how DOGE was out there firing everyone? Well, buried in all of that, they fired the entire team at the State Department whose job was to manage oil and gas relationships in the Middle East. Contacts at foreign energy companies, experts who tracked sanctioned oil tankers, the person who coordinates with the International Energy Agency when there’s a global crisis – gone. All of it. July 2025. The administration told Congress the other agencies would pick up the slack. The other agencies did not pick up the slack.

Six months later, we started bombing Iran.

Iran’s response was to basically shut down the Strait of Hormuz, which is the narrow waterway that 20% of the world’s oil supply moves through every single day. They didn’t even need a real blockade to do it – a few drone strikes in the area was enough to make shipping insurance companies say “absolutely not,” and when insurers pull out, ships stop moving.

Tanker traffic dropped 70%. Iraq started shutting down oil fields because it literally had nowhere to send the oil. The UAE and Saudi Arabia are scrambling to reroute shipments through backup pipelines that can handle maybe a quarter of what the strait normally moves. California gas is already over $5 a gallon and Iran is out here threatening $200 a barrel.

And the people who were supposed to have a plan for exactly this scenario are not employed by the U.S. government anymore.

Here’s what those people actually did, cause I think this is the part that gets lost. They modeled scenarios – meaning they sat around and ran the numbers on “what happens if the Strait of Hormuz closes?” They kept personal relationships with oil company executives in the Gulf so there was a human being to call when things went sideways. They tracked sanctioned tankers. They were the contact point between the U.S. government and the International Energy Agency, which is the organization that coordinates emergency reserve releases in a crisis.

The IEA just released 400 million barrels from global reserves – the most they’ve ever done – and the State Department’s liaison to that organization was fired eight months ago.

NOTUS (“News of the United States”) talked to nine of these former staffers and they all said the same thing: there’s nobody left to call.

Oil company executives who used to have a direct contact at State are being told by the remaining Treasury staff to just “hire some MAGA lobbyists” if they want to reach someone in the government. That’s not me being glib – that’s a direct quote from a former federal employee. People in active government group chats are posting things like “does anyone know who handles energy infrastructure in Ukraine?” That used to be someone’s whole job.

The administration’s defense is that the Bureau of Economic, Energy, and Business Affairs is “coordinating reserve releases with allies.” Sure. But the people who were supposed to spend years building the relationships and running the war games that make that coordination possible are gone. Geoffrey Pyatt, who was the assistant secretary for energy resources under Biden, put it as gently as anyone can: “I’m sure Secretary Rubio wishes he had that expertise available today.”

Trump’s advice to the ships sitting outside the strait afraid to move through a war zone was to “show some guts.”

They fired the people whose only job was to plan for the thing that just happened. And the thing just happened.

The dumbest people in the country are in charge of it.

Sources