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In mid-February, Trump administration leaders received a desperate warning from their diplomats posted in Vietnam, one of the most important American partners in Asia.
Workers were in the middle of cleaning up the site of an enormous chemical spill, the Bien Hoa air base, when Secretary of State Marco Rubio abruptly halted all foreign aid funding. The shutdown left exposed open pits of soil contaminated with dioxin, the deadly byproduct of Agent Orange, which the American military sprayed across large swaths of the country during the Vietnam War. After Rubio’s orders to stop work, the cleanup crews were forced to abandon the site, and, for weeks, all that was covering the contaminated dirt were tarps, which at one point blew off in the wind.
And even more pressing, the officials warned in a Feb. 14 letter obtained by ProPublica, Vietnam is on the verge of its rainy season, when torrential downpours are common. With enough rain, they said, soil contaminated with dioxin could flood into nearby communities, poisoning their food supplies.
Hundreds of thousands of people live around the Bien Hoa air base, and some of their homes abut the site’s perimeter fence, just yards from the contaminated areas. And less than 1,500 feet away is a major river that flows into Ho Chi Minh City, population 9 million.
“Simply put,” the officials added, “we are quickly heading toward an environmental and life-threatening catastrophe.”
They received no response from Washington, according to three people familiar with the situation.
Instead, Rubio and Peter Marocco, another top Trump appointee, have not only ordered the work to stop, but they also have frozen more than $1 million in payments for work already completed by the contractors the U.S. hired. The company overseeing the project is Tetra Tech, a publicly traded consulting and engineering firm based in the U.S., and a Vietnamese construction firm has been tasked with the excavation work.
Then, on Feb. 26, Rubio and Marocco canceled both companies’ contracts altogether before apparently reversing that decision about a week later, agency records show. As of Thursday, the companies had not been paid.
The Trump administration has told the courts repeatedly that its process to dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development, which manages the project’s funds, has been careful and considered. But the botched situation at Bien Hoa is a stark example of the whiplash, conflicting messages and dire consequences that aid organizations worldwide have faced since early February.
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 would typically travel to the air base to provide oversight have been placed on administrative leave or prevented from traveling 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. The confusion has left many at both the embassy and in Washington in the dark about where the situation stands.
To ascertain the current status of the work, ProPublica hired a reporter to visit the air base on Friday.
Workers are laboring in 95 degree heat, surrounded by toxic soil. The site has a skeleton crew of less than half of what they previously had, according to workers and documents reviewed by ProPublica. Some staffers found new jobs during the suspension. People working at the site told the reporter they are worried about completing the work before the rainy season descends and are terrified the U.S. will pause the work again.
Since 2019, the U.S. government has collaborated with Vietnam’s Ministry of Defense to clean up the Bien Hoa air base and agreed to spend more than $430 million for the project. Unlike other foreign aid programs, addressing Agent Orange is more akin to restitution than charity because the U.S. brought the deadly substance there in the first place. “The dioxin remediation program is one of the core reasons why we have an extraordinary relationship with Vietnam today,” a State Department official told ProPublica, “a country that should by all rights hate us.”
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. Human rights groups, environmentalists and diplomats consider the cleanup work — along with disability assistance that the U.S. has provided to Agent Orange victims across the country — to be one of the most successful foreign aid initiatives of all time.
All of that was now in peril, the officials wrote in their Feb. 14 letter to USAID officials in Washington. “What immediate actions can be taken to avert a potential life-threatening incident while still maintaining compliance with the Executive Order and the suspension directives?” the officials wrote.
U.S. officials in Vietnam grew increasingly panicked. 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, that’s an environmental crime,” said Jan Haemers, CEO of another organization that previously worked in Vietnam to clean up Agent Orange in the soil. “If you stop in the middle, it’s worse than if you never started.”
The Bien Hoa air base on the outskirts of Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, in 2018. Workers were in the middle of cleaning up an enormous chemical spill there when Secretary of State Marco Rubio abruptly halted all foreign aid funding. (Thomas Watkins/ AFP/Getty Images)The State Department said in a statement that the contracts at Bien Hoa are “active and running” but did not respond to detailed follow-up questions. Tetra Tech and the Vietnamese construction firm did not respond to questions for this story. The Vietnamese Embassy and Ministry of Defense did not return requests for comment. But the Vietnamese Ministry of Foreign Affairs made a statement on Feb. 13 that it was “deeply concerned” about USAID program suspensions, specifically mentioning the Bien Hoa project.
Trump’s aides, including billionaire Elon Musk, began dismantling the U.S. foreign assistance system almost immediately after 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.
On Monday, Rubio boasted on X that they had cut 83% of USAID’s programs because they didn’t align with 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.
Every president since George W. Bush — including Trump — has made good on the American promise to repair relations with Vietnam by cleaning up Agent Orange and helping those sick 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. The U.S. now conducts $160 billion in annual commerce with Vietnam, which has also become a key partner against China’s growing influence in the South China Sea. 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 underpinned by the cooperation on Agent Orange,” said Charles Bailey, a former Ford Foundation representative in Vietnam who co-wrote a book on the country’s relations with the U.S. in the wake of the war. “It’s like pulling out one or two legs of the stool.”
The Bien Hoa project was formally launched and initial contracts signed during Trump’s first presidency. In another example of the administration’s confusing stance toward the project, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told his Vietnamese counterpart on a Feb. 7 phone call that Trump wanted to enhance defense ties by addressing war legacy issues, which include Agent Orange remediation. About half of the project’s funding comes from the Pentagon’s budget, though it’s funneled through USAID, so it was also caught up in the foreign aid freeze.
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 imagine a less reckless government looking at what we’re doing carefully and then deciding what’s in our interest,” David Shear, a former U.S. ambassador to Vietnam under Barack Obama, told ProPublica.
“But,” he said, “this is government reform by meat cleaver.”
The mixture known as Agent Orange is a combination of two herbicides that the U.S. brought to Vietnam in huge volumes to kill off jungles and mangroves that hid 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. During the war, the U.S. sprayed more than 10 million gallons of the herbicides across vast swaths of the country, exposing U.S. soldiers as well as millions of Vietnamese people and their future children to the deadly toxic substance.
A treatment center for children with disabilities in Ho Chi Minh City in 2009. Many of them are from areas that were heavily sprayed with Agent Orange during the war. (Kuni Takahashi/Getty Images)Storage sites like the air bases of Danang and Bien Hoa were heavily contaminated as barrels leaked, broke or were otherwise mishandled. Over the decades, dust has blown the contaminated soil off the bases and abundant rains have pushed the dioxin into waterways and the densely packed surrounding neighborhoods, contaminating fish as well as 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.
For decades since the war, and despite extensive documentation of higher rates of cancers and birth defects among people who had been exposed to the chemicals, the U.S. denied the mass toll Agent Orange had taken on Vietnamese people — as well as on American veterans, as ProPublica has previously reported. But starting in the mid-2000s under President George W. Bush, the U.S. 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 hired by the contractors wear extensive protective equipment in the sweltering humidity and must have their blood tested regularly for dioxin. When levels get too high, they are no longer allowed to work at the site. There are supposed to be extensive safety checks in place to ensure the dirt doesn’t poison military officials or the surrounding 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 requires extensive pumping and management of dioxin-contaminated water. 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.
After Rubio first issued sweeping stop-work orders to aid organizations and contractors around the world in late January, workers from the site were told to stay home for weeks. The companies stopped receiving money to cover payroll and their past invoices. Huge mounds of tarp-covered dirt dotted sections of the base.
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 U.S. A group of Democratic senators sent a letter to Hegseth and Rubio urging them to pay the contractors. “It would be difficult to overstate the damage to the relationship that would result if the U.S were to walk away from these war legacy programs,” they wrote. They got no response.
One of the senators who signed the letter, Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., told ProPublica that abandoning the Bien Hoa cleanup is “a betrayal of the goodwill our two nations built over 30 years” and a “gift to our adversaries.”
Even off-season rains pushed the sites to the brink, two sources said, with water pooling up to the edge of protective aprons, threatening to spill out onto an active military runway after recent rainstorms.
Heavier rains typically start in April before the downpours of the rainy season in May.
The contractors are desperately trying to secure the contaminated dirt and pits before then, according to interviews this week with several people working there. But they are two months behind schedule.
“The problem is that the Trump administration has destroyed USAID, so it’s very unclear how we’re going to complete this project,” said Tim Rieser, a longtime aide to former Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., who led a bipartisan delegation to break ground in Bien Hoa in 2019. “The people making the decisions probably know the least.”
Alex Mierjeski contributed research.
This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with Wisconsin Watch. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.
A behind-the-scenes legal effort to force Congress to call a convention to amend the Constitution could end up helping President Donald Trump in his push to expand presidential power.
While the convention effort is focused on the national debt, legal experts say it could open the door to other changes, such as limiting who can be a U.S. citizen, allowing the president to overrule Congress’ spending decisions or even making it legal for Trump to run for a third term.
Wisconsin Watch and ProPublica have obtained a draft version of a proposed lawsuit being floated to attorneys general in several states, revealing new details about who’s involved and their efforts to advance legal arguments that liberal and conservative legal scholars alike have criticized, calling them “wild,” “completely illegitimate” and “deeply flawed.”
The endeavor predates Trump’s second term but carries new weight as several members of Trump’s inner circle and House Speaker Mike Johnson have previously expressed support for a convention to limit federal government spending and power.
Article V of the Constitution requires Congress to call a convention to propose and pass amendments if two-thirds of states, or 34, request one. This type of convention has never happened in U.S. history, and a decadeslong effort to advance a so-called balanced budget amendment, which would prohibit the government from running a deficit, has stalled at 28.
Despite that, the lawsuit being circulated claims that Congress must hold a convention now because the states reached the two-thirds threshold in 1979. To get there, these activists count various calls for a convention dating back to the late 1700s. Wisconsin’s petition, for example, was written in 1929 and was an effort to repeal Prohibition. The oldest petition they cite, from New York, predates the Bill of Rights. Some others came on the eve of the Civil War.
A lawsuit being circulated claims that Congress must hold a convention to amend the Constitution now because the states reached the two-thirds threshold for calling one in 1979. However, they cite petitions going back hundreds of years, including this one from New York in 1789. ((<a href="https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/bcf4e50c-cd23-6423-e040-e00a18061eb6#/?uuid=bcf4e50c-cd24-6423-e040-e00a18061eb6">Via The New York Public Library</a>))“It is absurd, on the face of it, that they could count something that had to do with Prohibition as a call for a constitutional convention in 2025,” said Russ Feingold, a former Democratic senator from Wisconsin who co-wrote a book critical of convention efforts like this one. “They’re just playing games to try to pretend that the founders of this country wanted you to be able to mix and match resolutions from all different times in American history.”
To avoid the threat of a convention, the legislatures in some states like Colorado and Illinois have passed resolutions withdrawing their petitions. The draft lawsuit says those actions don’t count because “once the Article V bell has been rung, it cannot be unrung.” Nearly half the states the draft counts have rescinded their petitions.
The draft lawsuit is the work of the Federal Fiscal Sustainability Foundation, a low-profile nonprofit that has drawn support from balanced budget advocates and the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council. The group’s chair, David M. Walker, oversaw government accountability as U.S. comptroller general during both the Clinton and Bush administrations. The draft lawsuit is signed by Charles “Chuck” Cooper, a high-powered conservative lawyer in Washington, D.C., who represented Trump’s previous attorney general during the special counsel’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.
Walker and his team have shopped the lawsuit to over a dozen state attorneys general and Republican-controlled legislatures seeking to find states to serve as plaintiffs, according to emails obtained through records requests, public testimony and interviews. Alongside ALEC’s CEO, they met with members of the Utah attorney general’s office in 2023, trying to recruit the state to take the lead, and planned to meet with Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, emails show. Lawmakers in Utah, Arizona, South Carolina and West Virginia have sought to get their states to join the lawsuit.
Walker declined to confirm the authenticity of the draft complaint and wouldn’t say which states have signed onto the lawsuit. But it mirrors the legal arguments Walker and his group have made, and the document’s metadata shows Cooper’s firm authored it. Neither Cooper nor his firm returned repeated requests for comment. An ALEC spokesperson said the group has merely provided a “forum” to “exchange ideas.”
Walker said an attorney general’s office has written its own version with “modifications.” He said he hopes the states will announce their intent to sue within the next two months and file shortly after.
Walker and the draft complaint say the convention is necessary to confront the national debt and would be limited to discussing fiscal responsibility.
“Some people think that the convention would get together to basically rewrite the Constitution. That’s totally false,” Walker said. “That has nothing to do with what we’re proposing. Under Article V, it’s just a separate way to get an amendment to the existing constitution.”
The legal effort is headed by David M. Walker, the former U.S. comptroller general, shown here in 2006, first image. The draft lawsuit is signed by Charles “Chuck” Cooper, an influential conservative lawyer in Washington, D.C., shown here in 2011. (First image: Chris Carson/AP. Second image: Paul Sakuma/AP.)Dozens of legal scholars and hundreds of civil society groups, organized by the government watchdog Common Cause, have warned that it would be exceedingly difficult to constrain a convention to just one idea and that calling one would expose the entire Constitution to revision. Some of them say the risk has grown under Trump.
“Nobody is observing any restraints on their power,” Georgetown law professor and convention critic David Super said. “If he continues to lose in the courts, one can imagine he will be trying to get a convention to adopt his view of presidential powers.”
Asked to respond, White House spokesperson Anna Kelly accused Wisconsin Watch of having “TDS” (Trump derangement syndrome) and being a “dark money” group. (Wisconsin Watch makes its donors public here.)
Sam Fieldman, of the campaign finance reform group Wolf-PAC, has individually worked with the foundation on the lawsuit. He said the process empowers states to check the federal government and change the Constitution if Congress fails to act.
“People who are claiming that this process will lead to tyranny are sitting here twiddling their thumbs while we are heading toward tyranny like a rocket right now,” Fieldman said.
“Fuzzy Math” and a “Time Machine”Throughout history, the Constitution has been amended 27 times, including to abolish slavery and provide women with the right to vote. An amendment must be approved by two-thirds of both houses of Congress. It then must be ratified by three-quarters of the states to become law.
The Constitution also offers another way: Congress can call a convention after two-thirds of state legislatures request one.
But Article V provides few other details. It does not say what constitutes a valid application or how to add them together to reach 34. Nor does it say how a convention should run. It does not enumerate specifics on delegates, such as who can serve and how states should select them, nor whether each state gets one vote or votes relative to population. And it does not specify whether a convention can be limited to specific issues.
As of now, the three-fourths ratification requirement still stands. Critics fear delegates could take the extreme step of lowering the threshold to make it easier for the amendments to pass, a scenario that proponents dismiss as “fear mongering.”
Fewer than half the states have laws or policies governing convention procedures. The majority of those would give state legislators, rather than voters, the ability to select delegates. They’d also permit each state one vote, according to a 2025 review by the Center for Media and Democracy, a progressive government watchdog.
The center obtained audio of former Republican Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania at a private ALEC workshop saying that because “most states are going to be controlled by Republicans,” rural and Republican voters will have “an outsize granted power” in a convention.
“We have the opportunity as a result of that to have a supermajority,” he said, even though “we may not even be in an absolute majority when it comes to the people who agree with us.”
Santorum did not return emails seeking comment.
Over the years, people from across the political spectrum have attempted to call conventions for various topics, such as campaign finance reform and congressional term limits. None of the advocates have tried to use states’ old calls that didn’t specify a topic to reach the required 34.
But during a 2020 ALEC presentation, a balanced budget activist named David Biddulph debuted a new theory: By combining old resolutions that generally called for a convention with ones for a balanced budget amendment, the nation already surpassed the threshold.
Illinois has since withdrawn its 1861 resolution. (1861 Ill. Laws 281-82, highlights added by Wisconsin Watch and ProPublica.)Biddulph said he based his theory on a paper authored by Robert Natelson, a former law professor who focuses on Article V, and published by the Federalist Society in 2018. But Natelson’s paper did not claim the threshold had been reached, and in an interview, he said he disagrees with activists claiming otherwise.
During the presentation, moderated by former Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, Biddulph announced that his organization, which became the Federal Fiscal Sustainability Foundation, was encouraging attorneys general to file suit against Congress.
Biddulph did not respond to repeated calls and emails seeking comment.
That same theory forms the basis of the draft lawsuit, which counts six petitions that called for a convention without stating a specific purpose alongside balanced budget ones to support their claim for a convention.
“They realize they will never get to 34 honestly now, so they are talking about a new math,” said Nancy MacLean, a historian whose book “Democracy in Chains” discusses the dangers of a convention. Some convention opponents, like Super, refer to this as the “fuzzy math” theory.
During a legislative hearing in Utah, Sharon Anderson, a conservative opponent of a convention, used a metaphor to criticize the counting method.
“A certain team, discouraged that they hadn’t scored the winning touchdown yet, devised a way to win the game,” Anderson said. “Instead of actually getting the ball into the end zone, they would basically add up all the yards they had gained until they totaled a distance needed to cross the goal line.”
But Natelson, a member of ALEC’s board of scholars who is cited repeatedly in the lawsuit, said if lawmakers had wanted to limit their calls to specific topics, they could have done so.
A Washington, D.C., newspaper, The Evening Star, ran an Associated Press article in 1929 detailing Wisconsin’s call for a constitutional convention. (Via Chronicling America)The second key part of the foundation’s legal argument is timing, which opponents like Super refer to as the “time machine” theory. Wisconsin passed a balanced budget amendment resolution in 2017, yet the draft instead includes the state’s Prohibition-era petition because it’s counting applications on the books between 1979 and 1998 — a period when the draft argues at least 34 existed.
Unmentioned, however, is that almost nobody during that period claimed that the nation had surpassed the threshold.
This is unlike recent debates over the Equal Rights Amendment, which would prohibit discrimination based on sex. Some argue that enough states have now approved the amendment, but the U.S. archivist declined to certify it because Congress explicitly set a deadline for ratification that states did not meet.
Getting States on BoardBiddulph and others began to enlist state support in 2022 with an email that announced: “The historic milestone of 34 Article V state resolutions calling for an amendment convention to propose a Balanced Budget Amendment (BBA) has finally been achieved, and surprisingly it happened over 40 years ago.”
The message, obtained by the Center for Media and Democracy and provided to Wisconsin Watch and ProPublica, asked states to pass a resolution demanding Congress call a convention and directing the state’s legislature and attorney general to “take such actions as will require Congress’s compliance.”
Republican state lawmakers in Utah and South Carolina responded within days, introducing measures incorporating some of the proposed language.
“We have a tremendous opportunity as a state to deal with an issue that is a very serious and grave moment in our nation,” Utah state Rep. Ken Ivory, a Republican who introduced the measure, said at a legislative hearing in February 2022. “It’s the power of the state to be able to deal with the excessive debt and the financial explosion and the swindling, as Thomas Jefferson said, the swindling of the future on a massive scale.”
Since the Utah hearing, Arizona and West Virginia have also introduced measures demanding Congress call a convention. West Virginia’s was the most explicit, resolving to “commence federal court action” against Congress, and advanced the furthest, passing the state House of Delegates before stalling in its Senate. So far, none of the resolutions has been adopted. West Virginia’s was reintroduced last month.
In February 2024, activists believed they were close to filing the lawsuit, emails obtained through a public records request show. The Senate presidents and House speakers in Utah and Arizona signed letters expressing their interest in joining a federal lawsuit against Congress to force a convention on fiscal issues.
In an email that was cc’d to the Arizona lawmaker who sponsored the state’s resolution, convention supporter Mike Kapic celebrated Utah’s and Arizona’s interest as a “win.”
“One more and UT says they’ll lead the filing in federal court,” Kapic wrote. “Then watch other states rush to file.”
It still hasn’t happened. The Arizona Legislature does not have standing to file a lawsuit on its own, a spokesperson for the state attorney general said, and the Democratic attorney general has not agreed to take the case.
A spokesperson for the Utah attorney general’s office declined to comment on whether the state had agreed to file the suit.
Ivory said by email that he is unaware whether Utah has any current plans to sue Congress. “New AG, New Congress, New President,” he wrote, adding that he believes “negotiations” may be taking place with Congress “with potential promising results,” but that he is not involved.
Alaska is the only state listed on the draft complaint, but the state attorney general’s office would not confirm whether it has joined.
In Congress, Texas Republican Rep. Jodey Arrington has also introduced resolutions to trigger a convention, including one he put forward last month. His office did not agree to an interview.
If Congress does call a convention, it would likely be up to delegates to keep it from creeping into other parts of the Constitution.
Historians generally agree that the 1787 constitutional convention itself was a runaway convention. Delegates met in Philadelphia to amend the Articles of Confederation, a process that required unanimity among states. Instead, they scrapped the entire document and drafted the Constitution, proposing a lower threshold for states to ratify amendments.
Mollie Simon contributed research.
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