Trump Administration Eliminated Energy Experts Who Model Oil Market Shocks Ahead Of Iran Strikes — Elevates Risk Of Price Surges

The Trump administration gutted the very government offices built to manage an oil market crisis months before it launched the military strikes that triggered one.

In July 2025, as part of a reduction-in-force (RIF) initiative carried out under the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the State Department eliminated most of its Bureau of Energy Resources, stripping away analysts who modelled Strait of Hormuz closure scenarios, maintained direct relationships with Gulf oil producers, and liaised with foreign energy ministries.

Around the same time, the Energy Information Administration (EIA), the independent agency whose data underpins every major oil market decision taken by governments, traders, and central banks, lost more than 100 of its roughly 350 staff and cancelled its flagship International Energy Outlook citing 'loss of key resources.'

On 28 February 2026, the United States and Israel launched coordinated strikes on Iran under Operation Epic Fury. Within days, Brent crude surged past £79 ($100) per barrel for the first time in four years, tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz collapsed, and Gulf producers began halting output. The administration now faces the largest disruption to the global oil market since the 1970s energy crisis, according to market analysts at Kpler, with far fewer energy security experts in post than at any point in recent memory.

The Dismantling of the State Department's Energy Bureau

When the State Department carried out its July 2025 RIFs, the administration notified Congress that of the 1,300 positions cut across the department, the Bureau of Energy Resources was almost entirely eliminated. The only staff retained, the administration told lawmakers, were those working on critical minerals and clean energy. The analysts responsible for Middle Eastern petroleum, the people who would have been stress-testing Hormuz closure scenarios and fielding calls from Saudi Aramco, were gone.

Geoffrey Pyatt, who served as assistant secretary of state for energy resources from September 2022 until January 2025, his State Department biography confirms both his role and the bureau's mandate, told NOTUS in reporting published on 17 March 2026: 'I'm sure Secretary Rubio wishes he had that expertise available today. Most of that institutional knowledge was lost with the elimination of the bureau and RIFs last fall.' Pyatt is a career Foreign Service officer at the rank of Career Ambassador who previously served as US Ambassador to Greece and Ukraine.

NOTUS spoke with nine former oil and gas specialists across the State Department, Treasury Department, Energy Department, and the National Security Council. All nine, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said the transition of those responsibilities to other agencies that was promised by the administration never materialised.

'We never did the kind of work that ENR did,' one former Department of Energy staffer told NOTUS. 'We didn't do direct sanctions, we never did a whole lot of outreach to industry. They are not necessarily having the time to be market experts and reach out to companies.' The bureau's elimination also removed, according to those sources, the only expert tracking sanctioned tankers and the officer responsible for liaising with the International Energy Agency.

The American Federation of Government Employees, which represents State Department workers, documented the wider RIF process in a July 2025 statement, noting that the reorganisation was being led jointly by Secretary Rubio and DOGE. The Department of Energy did not respond to NOTUS's request for comment on the article.

The EIA's Intelligence Gap

Even before the Hormuz crisis broke, the energy data infrastructure the US government depends upon had already been hollowed out. ProPublica reported in May 2025 that the EIA had lost more than 100 of its roughly 350-person workforce to DOGE cuts and deferred resignation offers, a reduction of nearly 40 per cent. The EIA was established in the 1970s, in direct response to the Arab oil embargo, precisely to ensure the US government would never again be caught without reliable energy data in a crisis.

In April 2025, the EIA's Office of Energy Analysis assistant administrator Angelina LaRose sent an internal email to staff, later obtained and verified by both ProPublica and Argus Media, confirming that the agency would not publish its International Energy Outlook (IEO) for 2025.

'At this point, you can assume that we will not be releasing the IEO this year,' LaRose wrote. 'This was a difficult decision based on the loss of key resources.' The IEO, published every two years, is the document that models long-term global oil supply-and-demand trajectories under multiple geopolitical scenarios. Its absence leaves traders, foreign governments, and military planners without the scenario modelling they normally rely upon.

Daniel Yergin, vice chairman of S&P Global and one of the most cited authorities in global oil markets, has previously described EIA data as 'the gold standard' of energy analysis. The EIA's own acting administrator, testifying before Congress, simultaneously praised the agency as 'the world's premier energy data agency' and called it 'in urgent need of revitalisation,' while the cuts that prevented that revitalisation continued around him.

By December 2025, staffing shortages caused the EIA to delay its Weekly Petroleum Status Report, a publication so reliable it had shipped on time through every government shutdown in its history. One Bloomberg source described the data environment as one where industry participants were 'rolling their eyes on how inefficient and unpredictable data has become from the US government.'

The Crisis the Cuts Were Made For

On 28 February 2026, Operation Epic Fury began. The coordinated US-Israeli strikes on Iranian military facilities, nuclear sites, and senior leadership killed the Supreme Leader and triggered the retaliatory closure of the Strait of Hormuz, the world's single most critical energy chokepoint. According to Kpler's real-time analysis, crude tanker transits through the strait dropped from an average of 24 per day to just four on 1 March. The disruption affected approximately 20 per cent of global daily oil supply and 22 per cent of global liquefied natural gas trade.

Brent crude surpassed £79 ($100) per barrel on 8 March for the first time since 2022, peaking above £99 ($126) in the days that followed. Kuwait, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE collectively reported a drop in output of at least 10 million barrels per day by 12 March, per the Wikipedia economic impact compilation sourced to live market data.

Euronews reported that Goldman Sachs raised its oil price forecast and warned that five weeks of sustained Hormuz disruption could lock prices at £79 ($100) a barrel. The IRGC warned separately that Iran would keep the waterway closed and that prices of £158 ($200) per barrel were 'expected.' That figure is an Iranian military statement, not an independent forecast.

The US Strategic Petroleum Reserve held 415.4 million barrels as of 18 February 2026, according to a Department of Energy figure cited by Al Jazeera. With a maximum drawdown capacity of 4.4 million barrels per day and a 13-day delivery lag to US markets, even a full release cannot substitute for a functioning Strait.

The International Energy Agency agreed to release 400 million barrels from member state reserves, a volume equivalent to roughly 20 days of normal Hormuz flow. Analysts at Bruegel, the Brussels economic think-tank, noted that European gas prices rose 20 per cent on 2 March alone, with the continent entering the crisis with gas storage at 46 billion cubic metres, well below the 77 billion recorded in 2024.

Before the strikes, the administration could have asked a bureau full of regional energy experts: what happens to Gulf production if this goes badly? What are the second-order effects on allied refiners? Who do we call at ADNOC or Saudi Aramco when shipments halt? 'Before any of this should have happened, there should have been discussion about what are the implications of this,' one former State Department staffer told NOTUS. There was no one left to have that discussion with.

The administration dismantled the offices designed to manage exactly this kind of crisis — and then started the crisis anyway.