How USAID cuts threaten the Agent Orange cleanup and other efforts in Vietnam

At a former American air base in southern Vietnam, work abruptly stopped last month on efforts to clean up tons of soil contaminated with deadly dioxin from the military’s Agent Orange defoliant.

The Trump administration’s broad cuts to USAID also halted efforts to clear unexploded American munitions and landmines, a rehabilitation program for war victims, and work on a museum exhibit detailing U.S. efforts to remediate the damage of the Vietnam War.

In addition to exposing thousands of people to health hazards, the cuts risk jeopardizing hard-won diplomatic gains with Vietnam, whose strategic importance is growing as the U.S. looks for support in its efforts to counter an increasingly aggressive China.

“It doesn’t help at all,” said Chuck Searcy, an American Vietnam War veteran who has dedicated his time to humanitarian programs in the country for the last three decades. “It is just another example of what a lot of critics want to remind us of: You can’t depend on the Americans. It is not a good message.”

Funding for the Agent Orange cleanup at Bien Hoa Air Base was unfrozen about a week after it was stopped, but it’s unclear whether funds are fully flowing or how they’ll be disbursed, with no USAID employees left to administer operations, said Tim Rieser, a senior adviser to Sen. Peter Welch, who drafted a letter to administration officials signed by Welch and more than a dozen other Democratic senators urging the continued funding of the programs.

Other programs remain cut.

“They have reversed a number of these arbitrary decisions, but we’re far from out of the woods and we don’t know how this is going to end,” Rieser said.

From foes to friends

The interruptions to aid come as the U.S. and Vietnam prepare to mark the 50th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War and the 30th anniversary of the normalization of relations between Washington and Hanoi.

It was a slow road back from the war, which lasted some 20 years and saw more than 58,000 Americans, and many times that number of Vietnamese, killed before it finally ended in 1975.

Starting in the 1990s, the U.S. began helping its former enemy address wartime legacies like Agent Orange, a herbicide dropped from planes during the war to clear jungle brush, and which was later found to cause a wide range of health problems, including cancer and birth defects.

The two countries have since been increasing defense and security cooperation as China has become more assertive in the region. In 2023, Vietnam elevated relations with the U.S. to a comprehensive strategic partnership, the highest level of cooperation and the same as Russia and China.

Trump cuts foreign aid, alleging waste

On Inauguration Day, Trump issued an executive order directing a freeze of foreign assistance funding and a review of all U.S. aid and development work abroad, alleging that much of foreign assistance was wasteful and advanced a liberal agenda.

But Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth on Feb. 7 “underscored the department’s support for ongoing efforts to collaborate on the legacy of war issues,” in his introductory call with his Vietnamese counterpart, according to the Defense Department.

Twenty days later, the administration ordered all but a fraction of U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, staffers off the job and terminated at least 83% of its contracts and cut programs globally, including in Vietnam.

Rieser, who was retired Sen. Patrick Leahy’s foreign policy aide when the Vermont Democrat secured the original funding for Vietnam War remediation projects, said the idea that money was being wasted is “factually wrong.”

“Our foreign aid advances our own national interests, and if the Trump administration doesn’t understand that, it’s hard to know what to say,” he said.

Agent Orange cleanup funding resumed, but project’s future is uncertain

A U.S. project to clean up the former Da Nang Air Base was successfully completed in 2018, giving rise to the Bien Hoa cleanup effort outside Ho Chi Minh City, formerly known as Saigon.

The contamination at Bien Hoa, the busiest airport in the world during the war, was nearly four times greater than in Da Nang, with some 500,000 cubic meters (650,000 cubic yards) of dioxin-contaminated soil and sediment.

As of 2024, the province in which Bien Hoa is located had more than 8,600 people still suffering from Agent Orange-related health issues, according to local authorities.

Work began in 2020 on a 10-year project funded by USAID and the Department of Defense, with an estimated cost of $430 million overall. Soil with low levels of dioxin contamination were to be unearthed and taken to secure landfills, while highly contaminated soil was to be taken to short-term storage for treatment.

Workers have already excavated more than 100,000 cubic meters of dioxin-contaminated soil, with 13 hectares treated. Ground was to be broken next month on the construction of a system to treat the most severely contaminated soil.

“You have to wonder if the people who made the decision to freeze these funds know anything about the tragic history of the U.S. and Vietnam … and they must not care about the many thousands of tons of severely contaminated soil that is exposing tens of thousands of people to a very serious health risk,” Rieser said.

The U.S. Embassy in Hanoi and USAID referred all questions on the war legacy projects to the State Department in Washington.

In a one-line email, the State Department said that “USAID has three contracts conducting dioxin remediation at Bien Hoa in Vietnam that are active and running.”

Asked to elaborate on how long the Bien Hoa project was shut down and what operations had resumed, as well as the status of other war legacy programs, the State Department said “we have nothing to share on the details of these programs at this time.”

Vietnam’s Defense Ministry referred questions to the Foreign Ministry, which did not respond to requests for comment.

But in a Feb. 13 press conference, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Pham Thu Hang expressed concern about what could happen if American funding for war legacy projects, which amounts to some $200 million per year, were to end.

“The suspension of USAID-supported projects, especially those on clearing bombs and explosives left over from the war, as well as the Bien Hoa airport detoxification project, will have a strong impact on human safety as well as the environment in the project areas,” she said.

On Tuesday, a U.S. federal judge ruled that the dismantling of USAID likely violated the U.S. Constitution and blocked further cuts, but stopped short of reversing firings or fully resurrecting the agency.

Cuts risk undoing decades of diplomacy

Leahy, who retired in 2023, told The Associated Press that it had been a lengthy process over the last 35 years to build the relationship by working with the Vietnamese to address the problems left behind.

“It is through these efforts that two former enemies are now partners. If we pack up and leave without finishing what we started, it will send a message that the Americans can’t be trusted,” he wrote in an email.

“People in the Trump administration who know nothing and care less about these programs are arbitrarily jeopardizing relations with a strategic partner in one of the most challenging regions of the world.”

It’s too early to say exactly how the abrupt decision will affect relations, but it is likely to call into question whether Washington is still a reliable partner in other dealings, said Nguyen Khac Giang, a political scientist who is a visiting fellow in the Vietnam Studies Program at Singapore’s ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute.

“The level of trust gradually increased and it is very easy to dismantle,” he said, adding that Vietnam may now think twice before deepening military cooperation ties or purchasing American weapons.

“There is good reason for Hanoi to be very cautious.”

POW/MIA projects not affected

One joint program not affected by the USAID cuts is ongoing efforts to find and identify missing American troops, the Hawaii-based Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency in Hawaii told the AP. Funding for the effort falls under the U.S. defense budget rather than foreign aid.

But funding for the effort to find and identify hundreds of thousands of missing Vietnamese war victims was cut, then reinstated, and it’s still unclear whether money is again flowing, Rieser said.

And, he said, funds remain frozen for a new U.S. exhibit at the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam’s main museum on the war, which is currently focused on documenting American atrocities like the My Lai massacre and the devastating impact of Agent Orange.

The exhibit, which was to open this year to coincide with the two anniversaries, highlights U.S. efforts to address the worst legacies of the war, Rieser said.

“Right now it’s a museum of American war crimes, and the whole point of this is to show that we didn’t just walk away from what happened, we decided to do something about it,” he said.

“We want that to be part of the story for the hundreds of thousands of visitors to that museum, to show that the United States didn’t just walk away.”

—David Rising and Aniruddha Ghosal, Associated Press