This article was first published by ProPublica, a Pulitzer Prize-winning analytical news website.
In mid-February, Trump administration officials received a hungry notice from their officials posted in Vietnam, one of the most crucial American colleagues in Asia.
When Secretary of State Marco Rubio instantly stopped all foreign support money, workers were in the middle of cleaning up the Bien Hoa air base, the site of an enormous chemical flow. The shutdown left exposed open mines of earth contaminated with dioxin, the fatal consequence of Agent Orange, which the British military sprayed across large swaths of the region during the Vietnam War. The recovery crews were forced to leave the site after Rubio’s orders to stop work, and for months all that was left were tents, which at one stage blew off in the wind.
And even more pressing, the leaders warned in a February 14 letter obtained by ProPublica, Vietnam is on the point of its cloudy year, when torrential storms are popular. According to them, dioxin-contaminated soil could flood into local communities and contaminate their food supplies with adequate rain.
Hundreds of thousands of people live around the Bien Hoa heat base, and some of their houses abut the project’s perimeter fence, only feet from the polluted areas. A big river that flows into Ho Chi Minh City, people 9 million, is located less than 1,500 feet apart.
” Just put”, the officers added,” we are rapidly heading toward an environmental and lethal catastrophe”.
According to three persons with knowledge of the situation, they were not contacted by Washington.
Instead, Rubio and Peter Marocco, another top Trump appointee, not only ordered the work to stop, but they also froze more than$ 1 million in payments for work already completed by the contractors the US hired. A Asian design firm has been given the task of carrying out the excavation work. The project is being managed by Tetra Tech, a publicly traded discussing and engineering firm based in the US.
Finally, on February 26, Rubio and Marocco canceled both organizations ‘ contracts altogether before evidently reversing that decision about a week later, company records show. The businesses had not been paid as of Thursday.
The Trump administration has told the courts repeatedly that its process to dismantle the USAgency for International Development, which manages the project’s funds, has been careful and considered. However, the disastrous situation at Bien Hoa is a stark illustration of the conflicting messages, dire consequences, and whiplash that aid organizations have experienced since early February.
On February 26, Rubio and Marocco canceled both companies ‘ contracts altogether before apparently reversing that decision about a week later, agency records show. The businesses had not been paid as of Thursday.
Now, after losing several weeks because of the administration’s orders, the companies are scrambling — at their own expense — to secure the Bien Hoa site before it starts raining, according to documents reviewed by ProPublica and several people familiar with the current situation.
The USAID officials who typically would visit the air base to provide oversight have been taken on administrative leave or prevented from arriving to check on the work. They’ve also been forbidden from communicating with the Vietnamese government or the companies working at the base, sources say, though they believe that directive was lifted after the contracts were recently reinstated. Many people at the embassy in Washington and at the embassy in Washington are unaware of the current state of affairs.
To ascertain the current status of the work, ProPublica hired a reporter to visit the air base on Friday.
Workers are surrounded by toxic soil while working in 95 degrees heat. The site has a skeleton crew of less than half of what they previously had, according to workers and documents reviewed by ProPublica. During the suspension, some staff members found new jobs. People working at the site told the reporter they are worried about completing the work before the rainy season descends and are terrified the US will pause the work again.
The US government and Vietnam’s Ministry of Defense have collaborated on the Bien Hoa air base since 2019 and have agreed to spend more than$ 430 million on the project. Unlike other foreign aid programs, addressing Agent Orange is more akin to restitution than charity because the US brought the deadly substance there in the first place.
A State Department official told ProPublica,” A country that should by all rights hate us,” that “one of the key reasons why we have an extraordinary relationship with Vietnam today is the dioxin remediation program.”
With enough contaminated soil to fill about 40, 000 dump trucks, the Bien Hoa air base is the largest deposit of postwar pesticides remaining in Vietnam after a decadeslong cleanup campaign. One of the most successful foreign aid initiatives ever, according to human rights organizations, environmentalists, and diplomats, along with the disability assistance that the US has provided to Agent Orange victims across the nation.
All of that was now in peril, the officials wrote in their February 14 letter to USAID officials in Washington. What steps can be taken immediately to avoid a potential life-threatening situation while still adhering to the executive order and the suspension orders? the officials wrote.
US officials in Vietnam started to panic more and more. The ambassador sent a diplomatic cable to Washington, and Congress and USAID’s inspector general each received a whistleblower complaint, multiple people told ProPublica.
” Halting a project like that in the middle of the work is an environmental crime,” said Jan Haemers, CEO of another organization that worked in Vietnam to remove Agent Orange from the soil. ” If you stop in the middle, it’s worse than if you never started”.
The State Department stated in a statement that Bien Hoa’s contracts are “active and running,” but it did not respond to specific follow-up inquiries. Tetra Tech and the Vietnamese construction firm did not respond to questions for this story. Requests for comment were not returned by the Vietnamese Embassy and Ministry of Defense. But the Vietnamese Ministry of Foreign Affairs made a statement on February 13 that it was “deeply concerned” about USAID program suspensions, specifically mentioning the Bien Hoa project.
Trump’s supporters, including billionaire Elon Musk, started tearing down the country’s foreign assistance system almost immediately following the inauguration. They dismissed USAID staff en masse, issued sweeping stop-work orders, froze funds and eventually canceled most of the agency’s contracts with aid organizations around the world, leaving countless children, refugees and other desperately vulnerable people without critical services.
Rubio claimed on X on Monday that they had cut 83 % of USAID’s programs because they didn’t support Trump’s agenda.
After terminating the contracts, Rubio, Musk and Marocco reversed several of their decisions in Vietnam, designating the Bien Hoa project as one of the few programs to survive, at least for now.
Since George W. Bush, every president, including Trump, has delivered on the American promise to mend relations with Vietnam by eradicating Agent Orange and providing assistance for those who are ill or disabled from dioxin poisoning. In 2017, Trump landed at Danang Airport, a prior cleanup site, ahead of a free-trade meeting with Asia-Pacific countries.
Vietnam, which has also grown increasingly important as a trading partner with China as it expands its influence in the South China Sea, currently receives$ 160 billion in annual business from the US. The Pentagon and Vietnamese military now work together as well, including efforts to locate the remains of soldiers missing in action from the war 50 years ago.
” All of this is supported by the cooperation on Agent Orange,” said Charles Bailey, a former Ford Foundation representative in Vietnam who co-wrote a book on the US’s relations following the war. ” It’s like pulling out one or two legs of the stool”.
During Trump’s first term as president, initial contracts were signed and the Bien Hoa project officially began. In another example of the administration’s confusing stance toward the project, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told his Vietnamese counterpart on a February 7 phone call that Trump wanted to enhance defense ties by addressing war legacy issues, which include Agent Orange remediation. Although the project’s funding comes from the Pentagon’s budget, which is funded by USAID, it also fell under the freeze for foreign aid.
Environmental consultants, foreign policy experts and government officials said the episode in Bien Hoa shows the administration did not do a thoughtful audit. One might envision a less obnoxious government taking into account what we’re doing carefully before deciding what’s best for us,” David Shear, a former US ambassador to Vietnam under Barack Obama, said.
” But”, he said,” this is government reform by meat cleaver”.
Agent Orange is a combination of two herbicides that the US shipped to Vietnam in large quantities to kill jungles and mangroves that were used to conceal opposition forces during the Vietnam War. The mixture contained dioxin, a deadly substance that not only causes a range of cancers and other illnesses, but is also linked to birth defects for babies exposed in utero.
More than 10 million gallons of the herbicides were sprayed across large swaths of the nation during the war, exposing the deadly toxic substance to US soldiers, Vietnamese citizens, and their future generations.
Storage sites like the air bases of Danang and Bien Hoa were heavily contaminated as barrels leaked, broke or were otherwise mishandled. Over the years, dust has contaminated the soil’s contamination, and frequent rains have pushed the dioxin into nearby neighborhoods and waterways, contaminating ducks and chicken that people raise for food.
Soil samples at the Bien Hoa base have shown dioxin at levels as high as 800 times the allowed amount in Vietnam.
The US has denied the widespread toll Agent Orange had had on Vietnamese people as well as American veterans, as ProPublica has previously reported, despite extensive documentation of higher rates of cancers and birth defects among those who had been exposed to the chemicals for decades.
But starting in the mid-2000s under President George W. Bush, the US began earmarking federal dollars for dioxin remediation in Vietnam to clean up the contamination sites and the two nations ‘ troubled relationship.
The cleanup work is dangerous and laborious. People who are hired by contractors must have their blood tested frequently for dioxin and use extensive protective equipment in the sweltering humidity. When levels get too high, they are no longer allowed to work at the site. According to the report, extensive safety checks are in place to protect the safety of military personnel and the local community.
The plan at Bien Hoa is to excavate a half-million cubic meters of the most contaminated soil and enclose it underground or cook it in an enormous furnace, which hasn’t been built yet, until the dioxin no longer poses a threat. The work calls for a lot of dioxin-contaminated water to be pump and managed.
Contractors are halfway through a 10-year project set to happen in stages, and the bulk of the excavation work must be done between December and April when there is less rain.
Workers at the site were instructed to stay at home for weeks after Rubio first issued extensive stop-work orders to aid organizations and contractors all over the world in late January. The companies stopped receiving money to cover payroll and their past invoices. Sections of the base were covered in dense mounds of tarp-covered dirt.
USAID and State Department staff scrambled to get the project back online through the State Department’s confusing waiver process and appealed to counterparts in the US. A group of Democratic senators emailed Hegseth and Rubio a letter informing them to pay the contractors. ” It would be difficult to overstate the damage to the relationship that would result if the US were to walk away from these war legacy programs”, they wrote. They received no response.
One of the senators who signed the letter, Jeff Merkley, D-Oregon, told ProPublica that abandoning the Bien Hoa cleanup was” a betrayal of the goodwill our two nations built over 30 years” and a “gift to our adversaries”.
According to two sources, even off-season rains caused the sites to become a blur, with water threatening to pour out onto an active military runway following recent rainstorms.
Heavier rains typically start in April before the downpours of the rainy season in May.
According to interviews conducted this week with several employees there, the contractors are working diligently to secure the contaminated dirt and pits before that time. But they are two months behind schedule.
The issue is that the Trump administration has completely destroyed USAID, making it difficult to predict how to carry out this project, according to Tim Rieser, a long-time aide to former Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy, who led a bipartisan delegation to begin operations in Bien Hoa in 2019. ” The people making the decisions probably know the least”.
Research was done by Alex Mierjeski.
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