‘A shell of our former self’: How Trump and Musk’s spending cuts are hampering US government readiness amid the Iran war

(CNN) — President Donald Trump began his second term with a promise to cut “billions and billions of dollars” in government spending, empowering Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency to eliminate programs and fire workers it deemed wasteful.

One year later, cuts to programs and personnel at federal agencies that had been declared unneeded mere months ago have hampered the US government’s abilities to prepare for domestic emergencies; monitor terror threats; guard against cyber-attacks; broadcast US information into Iran; and quickly help US citizens stranded abroad, current and former government officials told CNN.

Democrats and a handful of Republicans have long criticized the way that DOGE and the Trump administration slashed government programs, warning it harmed the US domestically and abroad. Now the cuts, which continued even after Musk left government last spring, are again being scrutinized as US strikes on Iran have sparked a war that’s spilled out across the Middle East.

“I think it went overboard. I thought it was too aggressive, too fast, too soon,” GOP Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania said of the DOGE cuts.

A former FBI special agent and federal prosecutor, Fitzpatrick told CNN he was against the way DOGE took a “sledgehammer” to agencies, and that lawmakers should look at whether there are “any negative implications from what was done through that process (and) if it’s having any negative impact on any aspect of our government, including our national security and national defense.”

The funding cuts did not appear to have affected the military’s funding for the war — though DOGE did propose nixing some programs at the Pentagon. Still, lawmakers are already talking about the need to pass supplemental funding to give the Defense Department tens of billions more for the war.

The Trump administration and Republicans argue that it’s Democrats who have harmed government preparedness to threats by not funding the Department of Homeland Security, which is shut down as the two parties point fingers over who’s to blame.

“Despite the Democrats’ decision to shut down the Department of Homeland Security, the Trump Administration is working diligently to ensure government security apparatuses continue to operate at the highest levels – and they are,” White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said in a statement.

Some Republicans also say the impact of the DOGE cuts to the government’s war response is overstated. GOP Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart, who chairs the House subcommittee that oversees the State Department and related national security budgets, maintained that the DOGE cuts only eliminated waste and did not impact the country’s ability to go to war with Iran.

The spending legislation he helped pass through Congress gave more money to US allies to confront China and Iran, he argued.

“We put more money, actual real hard money, into helping our allies confronting our adversaries” Diaz-Balart told CNN. “What we did is we got rid of all this trash that was there.”

‘We’re plainly seeing the consequences’

The confusion and frustration from Americans who were stranded in the Middle East as the war began laid bare what former State Department officials said was the agency’s diminished ability to quickly and clearly respond to the crisis following last year’s cuts and loss of personnel.

The State Department launched a 24/7 task force to assist Americans in the Middle East on the day the strikes began. However, until last Tuesday, the message on a State Department emergency call line told callers: “Please do not rely on the US government for assisted departure or evacuation at this time.” The recording has since been updated.

And last Monday, a post on X from the top official for consular affairs sparked questions and fear among stranded citizens as she urged them to “depart now” from 14 countries in the Middle East — before US government evacuation flights had begun and while the majority of commercial flights were suspended.

The first chartered evacuation flight carrying hundreds of American citizens arrived in the US last Thursday afternoon — five days after strikes began. The Department has since organized more than two dozen flights from the Middle East for thousands of Americans, a top official said.

The initial messaging was abysmal, one former official said, questioning how many people were laid off who could have helped the task force for stranded Americans.

“The administration thoughtlessly terminated people with crisis experience, and now they’re left without depth in the bench in the middle of a wide scale and broadening crisis,” said another former official with more than a decade experience in evacuation operations.

Terminations last July affected 1,107 civil service and 246 foreign service officers in Washington, DC, and a quarter of the foreign service “resigned, retired, (have) seen their agencies dismantled, or been removed from their posts” since last January, according to a December report from the American Foreign Service Association (AFSA), the union representing foreign service officers.

The State Department rejected the assertion that last year’s reductions in force (RIFs) impacted their assistance to US citizens stranded in the Middle East or to State’s consular operations.

“There were no RIFs that affected our overseas operations that are working in the field to assist Americans,” a senior State Department official said.

The AFSA argued last week State has been weakened by losing experienced personnel with “critical regional, crisis management, consular, and language expertise, including specialists in Farsi and Arabic — skills that are indispensable in moments like this,” the association argued last week.

Rep. Gregory Meeks, the top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told CNN: “There was always going to be a cost to the shortsighted gutting of the State Department, and now we’re plainly seeing the consequences.”

Several former State officials reached out offering to help with consular affairs after the war started, but either received no response or were told there were “no opportunities” for those who were laid off last year, according to emails shared with CNN.

State Department principal deputy spokesperson Tommy Pigott said Monday that “hundreds of experienced personnel are working on the task force” and that “there is currently no wait time for Americans reaching out for assistance.”

The State Department task force has directly assisted “over 23,000 Americans and organized two dozen charter flights,” Pigott said. Assistant Secretary of State Dylan Johnson said Monday that “at this time, seats available on the Department’s charter options are significantly greater than the demand from Americans in the region.”

Separately, a State Department office within its counterterrorism division that oversaw initiatives including countering Iran-linked terrorism was eliminated during last year’s agency reorganization and its civil servants laid off.

Work the office was doing was transferred to a new one now staffed with contractors and employees with limited experience working directly on counter-Iran initiatives, according to a former State Department official.

But beyond just the loss of personnel, the DOGE-led cuts at the State Department created a culture in which career staff are afraid to push back against political leadership for fear of retaliation, former officials told CNN.

“When you have people who are only politically oriented and want to appear like they’re following the Trump administration, they’re less likely to speak up when there’s lack of preparation,” another former State official said.

Domestic difficulties

The DOGE cuts have also put a spotlight on domestic preparedness for potential retaliatory attacks from Iran or its proxies on the US homeland.

Cuts to cyber personnel and resources at the Department of Homeland Security have meant less information-sharing with critical infrastructure firms on potential Iranian hacking threats than in similar situations in years past, according to current and former US officials and industry executives.

Officials still on the job are trying to pick up the slack — and have shared information on Iranian hacking techniques with private companies in recent days. But executives at industry groups have noticed a sharp drop in the level of engagement from government cyber officials compared to before last year’s DOGE-driven cuts at DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and other disruptions at the department.

“[T]here’s no comparison. I mean, our nation’s at war, the entire Middle East is being exposed to risk, including Americans and American business interests and critical dependencies, and we don’t have a DHS secretary or CISA director,” said Andy Jabbour, CEO at cybersecurity firm Gate 15, who is involved with multiple industry groups that trade cyberthreat information with the government.

The pace of intelligence sharing with the private sector has “dangerously slowed,” said Errol Weiss, chief security officer of the Health Information Sharing and Analysis Center (Health-ISAC), another industry threat-sharing group.

“To truly secure the homeland, the government must bring its unique, actionable intelligence to the table,” Weiss told CNN. “Otherwise, the US critical infrastructures are dangerously exposed.”

Trump administration cybersecurity officials held a short call last week with multiple industry groups. Officials relayed that there were no major cyber threats from Iran for the time being — but an industry source on the call described it as “a waste of time.”

At the Federal Emergency Management Agency — another agency overseen by DHS, charged with federal disaster response and keeping the government operational during emergencies — current and former officials say an overhaul during the last year has significantly weakened FEMA’s ability to respond to potential attacks on US soil.

FEMA has lost many of its most seasoned leaders, taking with them decades of expertise that can’t be outsourced or quickly replaced. At the same time, cuts to key contracts, trainings, equipment, maintenance and travel are reducing national preparedness and tanking morale at the agency, the current and former officials warned.

When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, the Biden administration formed a CISA and FEMA-led task force to monitor intelligence and threat indicators and prepare for a possible domestic attack, several sources said. “One could make the argument that we should be doing the same thing now,” one senior FEMA official told CNN.

But funding problems and scaled-back operations are putting pressure on the agency more broadly.

“We’re spending a tremendous amount of time on filling staffing gaps, writing contract memos, and dealing with the fact we’re in a lapse,” the senior official said. “Because everything is more complicated, rather than being able to put 100% of our effort on preparedness and readiness for a potential incident, we’re maybe able to put 50% of our attention on that.”

In a statement, DHS acknowledged that national security and preparedness are strained, but claimed it “has nothing to do with DOGE and everything to do with the Democrats refusing to fund DHS.”

“FEMA has the right leadership in place to remain focused on our mission,” the statement said, adding that “CISA was back on mission focused until two‑thirds of the workforce are furloughed at a time when cyber threats never stop.”

FBI fired agents who monitored threats from Iran

It’s not just DOGE cuts that are under scrutiny. Just days before the US began military operations, FBI Director Kash Patel fired a dozen agents and staff members from a counterintelligence unit tasked with monitoring threats from Iran, CNN previously reported.

The officials were removed because they were involved in the investigation into Trump’s alleged retention of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago.

The dismissals hamstrung the Washington, DC-based FBI counterintelligence unit, known as CI-12, that tracks foreign spies operating on US soil.

In Trump’s first term, CI-12 tracked potential threats from Iran following the 2020 drone strike that killed Gen. Qasem Soleimani, then-leader of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Quds Force.

The latest firings only added to concerns inside the Justice Department and FBI that counterterrorism and intelligence investigations could become hampered by a loss of national security experts, multiple sources familiar with the matter said.

An FBI spokesperson said the bureau “maintains a robust counterintelligence operation, with personnel all over the country.”

‘You can’t just flip it on’

Beyond the military’s kinetic ability to fight a war, other tools in the government’s arsenal that help determine success have been diminished, current and former officials say.

Voice of America, the government-funded US broadcaster, has become, according to one veteran VOA employee, “a shell of our former self.” The media outlet has long been seen as an important tool of American soft power and bringing the free flow of information to closed societies.

Kari Lake, who was named acting-CEO of the agency that oversees VOA last year, tried to fire most of the government-run broadcaster’s staff. Last week, a judge ruled Lake unlawfully ran the agency for several months last year and voided mass layoffs she carried out at VOA, but Lake says the agency will appeal.

While VOA brought back some furloughed employees before the war began, employees told CNN the efforts over the past year to dismantle Voice of America significantly harmed the agency’s ability to quickly and successfully broadcast in Iran — and to connect with Iranians as Trump was calling on them to “take over your government.”

In addition to the loss of manpower, VOA cut its broadcast infrastructure, canceling contracts with satellite providers last year to broadcast into Middle Eastern countries, according to VOA employees. That contributed to a broadcast outage in Iran the day before US military operations began when the agency’s satellite provider faced disruptions.

“We had a really good tool in the information war, and now it’s gone,” said the VOA employee. “You can’t just flip it on the next day. … And then I think even more difficult is the audience trust, because we disappeared for almost a year.”

The US ability to understand what is happening on the ground inside Iran has fallen, too, argued Michael Duffin, a former State Department official who was laid off and is now running for Congress as a Democrat.

An office within the State Department that tracked human rights, democracy and labor had its mandate shifted away from those issues, which “has made us limited in our view into what’s happening in the Middle East and Iran,” he said.

“When you’re talking to a human rights activist, a civil society leader of Iranian descent, who’s living in the UAE or Oman or elsewhere, that information goes into a cable,” he said. “That information is reviewed, seen by analysts in the intelligence community, analysts at the State Department and elsewhere, and it informs our foreign policy.”

CNN’s Lauren Kent, Hannah Rabinowitz and Holmes Lybrand contributed to this report.

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