Agent Orange cleanup and other efforts critical to ties with Vietnam
jeopardized by USAID cuts
[March 19, 2025]
By DAVID RISING and ANIRUDDHA GHOSAL
HANOI, Vietnam (AP) — 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, which is
strategically increasingly important as the U.S. looks for support in
its efforts to counter a growingly 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 comes 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 increasingly 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, citing 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, charging 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 the
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 from the former Da Nang Air Base was
successfully completed in 2018, giving rise to the Bien Hoa cleanup
effort outside of 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.
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Attendants sit next to a field contaminated with dioxin before a
ceremony marking the start of a project to clean up dioxin left over
from the Vietnam War, at a former U.S. military base in Danang,
Vietnam, Aug. 9, 2012. (AP Photo/Maika Elan, File)
“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 to rebuild ties with
Vietnam
Sen. 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 hand-in-hand 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, but others saw funding cut
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.”
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Rising reported from Bangkok.
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