Agent Orange cleanup, efforts critical to ties with Vietnam jeopardized by USAID cuts

HANOI, 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, 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.

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…