Trump Gutting USAID Leads to Catastrophe for Agent Orange Cleanup

The Trump administration’s gutting of the U.S. Agency for International Development ended up halting efforts to clean up Agent Orange in Vietnam, leaving thousands of Vietnamese people living near the Bien Hoa air base, the site of a major chemical spill, at risk of poisoning.

After Trump issued an executive order halting all foreign aid in February, cleanup efforts at the base suddenly ceased since workers weren’t being paid. Open pits contaminated with dioxin—a toxic by-product of Agent Orange, which the U.S. military used in the Vietnam War—were left exposed. For weeks, the pits were covered with tarps, which at one point even blew away with the wind.

U.S. diplomats stationed in Vietnam frantically contacted Washington on February 14 to relay the news, and also pointed out that Vietnam’s rainy season was soon coming, according to a letter obtained by ProPublica. If enough rain fell, they warned, contaminated soil could flood into nearby communities and poison water and food supplies.

Hundreds of thousands of people live near the base, only yards away from contaminated sites in some cases. A major river that flows into Ho Chi Minh City, with a population of nine million people, is only 1,500 feet away from the contaminated area.

The diplomats’ letter warned that “we are quickly heading toward an environmental and life-threatening catastrophe,” but received no response from Washington. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, along with Trump staffer Peter Marocco, then ordered the cleanup efforts to stop and froze $1 million in payments to contractors working on the cleanup before canceling the contracts altogether on February 26.

While Rubio and Marocco abruptly reversed their decision a week later, the companies still have not been paid as of Thursday. With a looming disaster, the companies are now scrambling to secure the area at their own expense before the rain arrives, according to ProPublica. And the USAID staff who would be providing oversight have either been placed on leave or barred from traveling.

The critical effort is one of the many casualties of Trump and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, which has made massive cuts across the federal government and decimated foreign aid projects. This cut is particularly bad not only because of the toxic consequences but also because the dioxin is only there thanks to the U.S. military spraying large quantities of Agent Orange across Vietnam during the Vietnam War.

Trying to minimize environmental and public health consequences from that spraying is very much America’s responsibility, but it seems that Trump, Musk, and Republicans couldn’t care less. They fail to realize that such international aid projects, including efforts to fund global public health, boost America’s “soft power” and improve the country’s image, particularly in a region where the U.S. caused lasting destruction.

The Trump administration continues to move the goalposts as backlash mounts against its recent deportation actions. 

On Friday, the president invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport more than 200 Venezuelan immigrants, alleging they were all gang members. The following day, a federal judge ordered any planes departing the U.S. on these grounds to return to the country. Still, two planes with Venezuelans were deported to El Salvador. The Trump administration claimed that while the judge sent a verbal order before takeoff, the written order came too late, as the order was electronically filed 45 minutes after the planes left U.S. airspace.

Trump press secretary Karoline Leavitt defended this nonsense position at a press conference on Monday. “Does the White House feel the need to reply with a verbal order from this judge?” a reporter asked Leavitt.

“As I said, all of the planes subject to the written order of this judge departed U.S. soil, U.S. territory before the judge’s written order.”

“But what about the verbal order, which of course carries the same legal weight as a written order, and said for the planes to turn around if they were in the air?”

“Well there’s actually questions about whether a verbal order carries the same weight as a … written order, and our lawyers are determined to ask and answer those questions in court.”  

The White House is offering up petty, measly excuses to justify its complete rebuke of the checks and balances system.

Republican lawmakers are going after the judicial branch, claiming that the legal appointees are attempting to usurp Donald Trump’s power for merely ruling against the president’s agenda.

“These far-left Resistance™ district court judges are under the impression they were elected president,” Senator Tom Cotton posted on X Monday. “The idea of ordering the President to turn around a plane filled with violent criminal illegal aliens is outrageous.”

Fox News also pitched in on the effort to condemn the judge, broadcasting a photo of James Boasberg, the chief judge of the Washington, D.C., District Court, to its millions of viewers.

The Trump administration ignored a judge’s order to turn around two planes carrying hundreds of alleged Venezuelan gang members on Saturday. In a verbal order, Boasberg demanded that the government cancel the flights immediately.

“You shall inform your clients of this immediately. Any plane containing these folks that is going to take off or is in the air needs to be returned to the United States,” Boasberg said during a hearing. “However that’s accomplished, turning around the plane, or not embarking anyone on the plane.… This is something that you need to make sure is complied with immediately.”

Regardless, the planes did not turn around.

Trump had invoked a Japanese internment-era wartime policy—the Alien Enemies Act—early Saturday to deport noncitizens he believed to be a part of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. Five of the men sued the Trump administration in response, attempting to prevent their “imminent removal.”

But hours later, when the emergency court hearing had taken a brief pause, the planes were skybound. Once Boasberg’s directive was received, Trump officials made the calculated decision to keep the planes en route to Honduras, alleging “operational” and “national security” reasons for their continued flight while claiming that the judge’s order was out of bounds since the planes had supposedly passed over international waters by the time the verbal order was given.

The following day, Trump had his explanation for the blatant infraction, claiming that the nation’s immigration constituted an “invasion” while describing the current era as a “time of war.”

“These are criminals, many, many criminals,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One. “Murderers, drug dealers at the highest level, drug lords. People from mental institutions.”

Donald Trump chose to threaten Iran Monday morning, warning the country the “consequences” will be “dire” if the Houthi movement in Yemen continues its attacks.

“Let nobody be fooled! The hundreds of attacks being made by Houthi, the sinister mobsters and thugs based in Yemen, who are hated by the Yemeni people, all emanate from, and are created by, IRAN. Any further attack or retaliation by the ‘Houthis’ will be met with great force, and there is no guarantee that that force will stop there,” Trump said in a long, rambling post on Truth Social.

“Every shot fired by the Houthis will be looked upon, from this point forward, as being a shot fired from the weapons and leadership of IRAN, and IRAN will be held responsible, and suffer the consequences, and those consequences will be dire!” Trump’s post continued, with the president uncharacteristically signing off with “DONALD J. TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.”

Trump’s saber-rattling comes after he ordered airstrikes on Houthi areas on Saturday following the Houthi movement’s announcement that it would attack Israeli-linked ships passing through the Red Sea on their way to the Suez Canal. That threat came in response to Israel blocking all aid from entering Gaza for more than two weeks.

The Trump administration said that the airstrikes killed multiple Houthi leaders. The deputy head of the Houthi media office, Nasruddin Amer, said that they would retaliate against the U.S. and continue their support for Gaza.

“Our position is clear and our demand is simple: lifting the siege on Gaza and saving the people of Gaza from starvation,” Amer posted on social media.

Trump’s threats toward Iran come two weeks after he sent a letter to Iran’s leaders offering a path to restart negotiations over the Iranian nuclear program. Trump infamously abandoned the 2018 landmark nuclear deal reached between the U.S., Iran, and five other countries during his first term. Monday’s threats will undermine any prospect for talks between the U.S. and Iran, if Trump was even serious about them in the first place, and further increase tensions in an already unstable Middle East.

Trump’s border czar proudly proclaimed that their administration could care less about what federal judges have to say about their hard-line immigration policies. 

“I wake up every morning loving my job because I work for the greatest president in the history of my life, and we’re gon’ make this country safe again. I’m proud to be a part of this administration,” Tom Homan raved on Fox News Monday morning. “We’re not stopping. I don’t care what the judges think, I don’t care what the left thinks, we’re comin.’” 

This comes after a weekend of the Trump administration ignoring court orders to deport immigrants in two high-profile cases. On Saturday, a federal judge ordered two planes of Venezuelans  being deported to El Salvador to return to the United States. The Trump administration, however, claimed the order came too late and the plane was already out of U.S. airspace, citing the time the order was filed in the court’s electronic docket instead of the verbal order, which came 45 minutes earlier. On Friday, Brown University doctor and legal visa holder Rasha Alawieh was also deported, despite a court order blocking her removal from the country.

Both cases follow the kidnapping of green card holder and pro-Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil and, along with Homan’s statement, finally confirm what many already knew: The “rule of law” has no power over this administration.

Several nuclear scientists, bomb engineers, and safety experts critical to national security were among the cuts made by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.

The New York Times reports that more than 130 members of a top secret agency, the National Nuclear Security Agency, either took the Trump administration’s deferred resignation “buyout” or were fired in the past six weeks, putting an effort to upgrade the American nuclear arsenal at risk.

These cuts include at least 27 engineers, 12 program or project managers, 13 program or project analysts, five scientists or physicists, six budget analysts or accountants, as well as multiple attorneys, safety experts, and compliance officers. The job losses are coming despite the NNSA being in its busiest period since the Cold War, according to the Times.

The agency is modernizing the country’s nuclear stockpile, comprising 3,748 bombs and warheads, an effort costing $20 billion a year to arm new land-based missiles, bomber jets, and nuclear submarines. The agency had built itself up to 2,000 workers in January, still short of what it said it needed, but the new cuts undo those gains and undermine the agency’s attempt to build up its staff to handle the workload.

The NNSA is part of the Department of Energy and usually stays out of the news. But it goes to show that even those most critical agencies have been subject to the wanton, haphazard budget cuts championed by Musk and the GOP in the supposed quest to find waste, fraud, and abuse. Many people who left the agency held top-secret security clearances, and it will be tough to train replacements.

“Who’s going to teach those new people?” one anonymous senior official who took the buyout told the Times. “Who’s going to mentor them, and who’s going to bring them up to speed?”

What is Chuck Schumer hiding from?

The Senate minority leader has postponed several tour appearances this week in Baltimore, Washington, D.C., New York, and Philadelphia for his upcoming book, Antisemitism in America: A Warning.

“Due to security concerns, Senator Schumer’s book events are being rescheduled,” said a spokesperson for Schumer. The new dates have not yet been announced.

The cancellations may have something to do with the intense backlash he’s facing after he voted for Republicans’ destructive budget last week, gifting them the funding and power to continue to ravage the federal government and carry out mass deportations.

There is palpable outrage throughout the Democratic establishment with Schumer’s decision. It wouldn’t be surprising if that same outrage was shown by the public. Schumer was publicly excoriated by Hakeem Jeffries and even Nancy Pelosi for the move—and there are plenty of scared, angry Democratic voters itching to show up to his town halls to do just the same.

Even still, Schumer has defended his position, insisting that a government shutdown was the worst option.

“If we go into a shutdown—and I told my caucus this—there’s no off-ramp. The total off-ramp of a shutdown, how you stop a shutdown, is totally determined by the Republican House and Senate,” he told reporters last week. “They’ve shown complete blind obeisance by Trump, DOGE, et cetera. They could keep us in a shutdown for months and months and months.”

One month before the election, 70 percent of Americans felt that foreign affairs comprised either a “very important” or “extremely important” component of their vote. But as it turns out, Donald Trump’s repeat campaign promises to end the war in Ukraine “in 24 hours” were just gas.

In an interview with Sharyl Attkisson broadcast Sunday, the president revealed he never actually intended to follow through on that.

“Well, I was being a little bit sarcastic when I said that,” Trump told Attkisson on her show Full Measure. “What I really mean is I’d like to get it settled, and I think I’ll be successful.”

It’s one of the rare occasions where Trump has actually admitted that he was wrong. But dressing up the blatant lie as a “little bit” of sarcasm is an awfully convenient way to circumnavigate blame for failing.

Trump had harped on the vow to instantaneously end the war for more than a year before taking back the White House. While speaking about the ongoing deaths of Ukrainians and Russians at a CNN town hall in May 2023, Trump claimed that he would “have that done in 24 hours.”

He amped up the proposition the next year. While debating former Vice President Kamala Harris in September 2024, Trump claimed that he would “get it settled before I even become president.”

The Trump administration’s special envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, visited Moscow last week to advance talks on the Ukrainian-approved ceasefire terms. Negotiators in Washington and Moscow are reportedly discussing how to divvy up assets between Russia and Ukraine to bring a close to the three-year war. Russian President Vladimir Putin and his allies have insisted that they intend to keep the land they’ve carved out of Ukraine’s borders for the Kremlin. They are also expected to stipulate that Ukraine never joins NATO, the strategic Western trade and military alliance that had promised in 2008 to absorb the Eastern European nation into its fold.

Russian forces crossed the Ukrainian border on February 24, 2022, which Putin tried to justify by falsely claiming that he needed to protect civilians in eastern Ukraine. But the Trump White House has proved remarkably hostile toward Ukraine in negotiations to close the conflict.

During Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s short visit to Washington late last month, Trump and Vice President JD Vance repeatedly attacked the wartime leader while verbally defending Putin. In doing so, they challenged America’s strongest alliances while ceding the world stage to America’s adversaries. In the weeks that followed, the White House ordered a pause on intelligence sharing with Kyiv and suspended military aid to the war-battered nation in defiance of the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, in which the U.S. and the U.K. agreed to defend Ukraine’s borders in exchange for Ukraine’s surrender of nuclear weapons. The aid and intelligence resumed last week after Zelenskiy publicly apologized for getting attacked.

Speaking with Attkisson on Sunday, Trump said that it would be “bad news for this world” if Putin refused the ceasefire terms.

“Bad news for this world because so many people are dying,” Trump said. “But I think, I think he’s going to agree. I really do. I think I know him pretty well, and I think he’s going to agree.”

A top official at the Commerce Department warned in a scathing resignation letter that Elon Musk intends to get rich at the expense of rural Americans.

Evan Feinman, the former director of the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment Program, or BEAD, which provides grants to expand internet access across the country, condemned the efforts of the billionaire bureaucrat—who also happens to own a satellite internet constellation that might directly profit from his dismissal.

“Stranding all or part of rural America with worse internet so that we can make the world’s richest man even richer is yet another in a long line of betrayals by Washington,” Feinman wrote Sunday in a lengthy email to his colleagues, obtained by Politico.

The BEAD program, overseen by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, which is housed within the Commerce Department, was granted $42.5 billion in 2021 by Joe Biden’s Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act to provide fast internet connection to millions of Americans. As of yet, no internet expansion projects have actually begun, though some states are closer to the finish line than others.

In a statement earlier this month, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick claimed that the Biden administration’s “woke mandates, favoritism towards certain technologies, and burdensome regulations” had prevented BEAD from connecting a single person to high speed internet.

Lutnick promised an overhaul of BEAD that would include “ripping out” the “pointless requirements” imposed by the previous administration, but did not specify what steps that would include, or what regulations he intended to remove.

The potential changes could offer a bigger piece of the pie to Musk’s Starlink by adopting “technology neutral” policies that will make way for the use of satellites in addition to fiber-optic cables. Starlink was expected to haul in around $4.1 billion under the existing rules but could rake in anywhere from $10 billion to $20 billion if Lutnick’s changes are accepted.

Feinman seemed to agree that the Biden administration had inserted some language for “messaging/political purposes, and were never central to the mission of the program.” But he was concerned that Lutnick’s changes could set the program back even further, as three states, Louisiana, Delaware, and Nevada, are currently trapped in limbo as they await approval from the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

“Shovels could already be in the ground in three states, and they could be in the ground in half the country by the summer without the proposed changes to project selection,” Feinman wrote.

Feinman was concerned that the Trump administration would undermine BEAD to turn a profit, against the best interest of rural Americans, lawmakers, or even the telecommunications industry.

He urged that officials “NOT change it to benefit technology that delivers slower speeds at higher costs to the household paying the bill.”

“Reach out to your congressional delegation and reach out to the Trump Administration and tell them to strip out the needless requirements, but not to strip away from states the flexibility to get the best connections for their people,” Feinman wrote.

Trump over the weekend invoked a sparsely used eighteenth-century law to carry out mass deportations—and, after outrage, justified doing so because we are in a “time of war.” 

On Saturday, the president used the Alien Enemies Act of 1798—untouched since the War of 1812 and the Japanese internment of the 1940s—to push the deportation of more than 200 Venezuelans, claiming they were Tren de Aragua gang members. The deportations were carried out despite a court order requiring all planes carrying people deported under the law to remain in the country.  

When asked the following day why he invoked wartime powers, Trump’s answer was telling. 

“Well this is a time of war. Because Biden allowed millions of people, many of them criminals, many of them at the highest level.… Other nations emptied their jails into the United States, it’s an invasion. These are criminals, many many criminals … murderers, drug dealers at the highest level, drug lords. People from mental institutions. That’s an invasion,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One, sliding effortlessly into the unfounded, racist rhetoric that has defined his political career. 

“In that sense this is war. In many respects it’s more dangerous than war because you know in war they have uniforms, you know who you’re shooting at, you know who you’re going after,” he continued. “We have thousands of murderers that Biden in his incompetence—he was grossly incompetent—Biden and his people.… It looked like we had an autopen for a president,” he said, insinuating that Biden was using an automatic signing device for all those last-minute pardons he did rather than signing them under his own power. 

Trump’s invocation is a doubling down upon his mass-deportation mission, and setting up a crisis by openly defying the courts. Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, a fellow authoritarian ruler and Trump ally, mocked the judge’s order, posting video after video of heavily armed police officers leading the returned migrants to prison.