QUANG TRI PROVINCE, Vietnam — The Vietnamese deminers who find and destroy the deadly remnants of America’s war here were on break for Lunar New Year when they received word an executive order by President Donald Trump had suspended funding for their work.

For a month, they hung up the khaki uniforms stitched with American flag patches, left their metal detectors in storage, and rerouted reports of grenades, cluster munitions and mortars to the Vietnamese authorities.

“People were calling us every day,” remembered Tran Binh Phuong, who leads several hundred personnel in the largest demining operation in central Vietnam’s Quang Tri province — an effort that relies wholly on U.S. funding. “They asked why, when this land still has so many explosives that continue to go off, why the funding was halted.”

Fifty years after the end of the Vietnam War, decades of progress in redressing the conflict’s legacy, fostering reconciliation between the United States and its former enemy, and forging ties between surviving soldiers, are coming undone under Trump, say current and former U.S. officials, Vietnamese analysts and independent aid groups.

The two U.S. agencies that led engagement with Vietnam’s communist government and its people — the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP) — have been effectively dismantled.

At least 34 of 43 USAID contracts with Vietnam have been axed, and 100 or so USAID employees terminated, according to interviews with more than a dozen U.S. officials and contractors, and government records obtained by The Washington Post. Joint work on health, climate and tech has been dropped, and efforts to address the aftereffects of U.S. military operations, from the cleanup of toxic chemicals to the search for the missing remains of Vietnamese soldiers, thrown into uncertainty.

What was meant to be a joint, first-of-its-kind exhibition at the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City to mark the 30th anniversary of the normalization of relations between the United States and Vietnam in July 1995 is in an indefinite limbo because the USAID and USIP officials charged with organizing it are no longer allowed to work. The exhibit, originally scheduled to open this summer in a room now filled with portraits of Agent Orange victims, would have told the story of bilateral cooperation in repairing the consequences of war.

Most pressing of all to the Vietnamese, say analysts and government advisers, is Trump’s campaign on free trade, which poses an existential threat to the export-reliant model of growth that Vietnam embraced, partly in response to American coaxing. Before he issued a pause for negotiations, Trump proposed a 46 percent tariff on Vietnam — among the highest levied against any country.

“Donald Trump threatens to sabotage — and I don’t use that word lightly — sabotage 30 years of cooperation with a key partner in one of the most challenging regions of the world,” said Patrick J. Leahy, a retired Democratic senator from Vermont. Leahy, 85, championed reconciliation with Vietnam and was the last senator to serve through the 1970s when he retired in 2023.

“It’s a colossal mistake,” Leahy added. “And about the only country that can really be happy about this is China.”

Chuck Searcy, a Vietnam War veteran who leads a humanitarian organization in Quang Tri, said he has worried for some time that the moral imperative for the U.S. to address its legacy in Vietnam would fade as veterans with living memories of the war died. But he didn’t expect it would happen so soon and all at once.

Whether the U.S. stays involved, the Vietnamese will have to continue living with the effects of the two-decade-long American campaign on their soil, said Searcy, 80. “They don’t have a choice.”

In a statement, a State Department spokesperson said the U.S. is “committed to deepening and broadening ties” with Vietnam.

The administration’s review of foreign assistance is ongoing, the spokesperson added, and programs are being terminated unless they meet the standard of making the U.S. “stronger, safer, or more prosperous.”

Vietnam’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs has publicly objected to both the U.S. withdrawal of aid and the imposition of tariffs even as it has continued to assert that the bilateral relationship is “ever-flourishing.” In rare conversations in the capital Hanoi, however, official advisers to the Vietnamese government said the Trump administration in four months has generated a level of distrust toward the U.S. not seen in decades.

“There are questions about U.S. reliability. There are questions about the future of the U.S.-Vietnam relationship,” said a foreign affairs adviser, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he had not been authorized to discuss government deliberations. “That old understanding between the U.S. and Vietnam that took years to build — we don’t know. Does it still matter?”

Before January, the U.S. had been deepening engagement with Vietnam, which borders China and is seen as a critical swing nation in the U.S.-China rivalry.

In 2023, during a visit by President Joe Biden, Vietnam elevated ties with the U.S. to a “comprehensive strategic partnership,” the highest bilateral status. Most of the initiatives Washington touted at the time as proving its commitment to Vietnam have now been canceled, said U.S. officials and contractors who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid repercussions from the Trump administration.

There was, for instance, a program to help American businesses tap into Vietnam’s renewable energy grid. Two agreements to prevent the spread of infectious diseases from animals to humans, signed in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. A more than $1 million effort to help prepare Vietnamese for worsening natural disasters. Funding for an American-style liberal arts university that had taken years for Vietnam’s government to approve.

“It’s been an embarrassment,” said a USAID contractor who was forced to lay off 25 employees even while being owed payments from the U.S. government for work done last year.

“We were a trusted voice here,” a USAID official said. “We’ve just given that up.”

The commercial relationship between the two countries has also been wounded by Trump’s threat of a 46 percent tariff. “There had been a sense that the relationship was special enough to supersede a tariff rate so high,” said Travis Mitchell, executive director of the American Chamber of Commerce in Ho Chi Minh City. “Clearly not.”

Some observers, such as former U.S. ambassador to Vietnam, Ted Osius, say they’re confident Vietnam is pragmatic enough to strike a deal with the Trump administration and continue working with the U.S. to balance the influence of China.

But Huong Le Thu, deputy director of the Asia program at the International Crisis Group, said underneath the realpolitik, the quality of the relationship between the two nations will suffer. It will become more transactional, she said, “and much shallower.”

In 2018, the day after USAID signed an agreement to undertake the cleanup of soil contaminated with hazardous dioxin from Agent Orange at a former American air base, Vietnam announced it would allow a U.S. aircraft carrier to dock in the country for the first time since the war. In Washington, this was seen as evidence, “in living color,” of the correlation between America’s aid work and security interests, said Dorothy Rayburn, 78, who was a USAID congressional liaison at the time.

When Trump issued his stop-work order in January, the cleanup at Bien Hoa air base ground to a halt. Under pressure from former U.S. ambassadors and Vietnamese authorities, the administration said in March it would allow the Bien Hoa project, the demining at Quang Tri and other war legacy work to proceed. A State Department spokesperson said Monday that war legacy projects are “active.”

But some programs that were supposed to have been granted waivers, such as an initiative to support disabled victims of Agent Orange, have not actually seen funding reinstated, said U.S. officials and contractors. Others have been given permission to operate only through September.

At Bien Hoa, progress has stalled because Washington will not approve the release of funding to a contractor hired to build a treatment plant. More than 100,000 cubic meters of dioxin-contaminated soil has already been excavated and cannot be left untreated for too long, particularly after the arrival of heavy rains in May, warn USAID officials.

In Quang Tri, the Mines Advisory Group (MAG) resumed field operations at the start of April. But more explosives were dropped here than all of Germany throughout World War II, and deminers say they need at least a decade more of funding at current levels to make it safe. Ordnance from the war has killed over 3,400 people in Quang Tri since 1975, a third of them children.

Last week, the deadline for Trump’s 90-day review of aid passed with no verdict on the program. MAG said the future of its U.S.-funded operations in Vietnam remains uncertain.

“We wouldn’t have a U.S.-Vietnam relationship if not for the legacy of war work,” said Daniel J. Kritenbrink, who served as U.S. ambassador to Vietnam during Trump’s first administration. “It forms a foundation of trust,” he added. “And we tinker with that foundation at our own peril.”

Before it was shut down, one of USIP’s main roles in Vietnam was bringing Vietnamese and American veterans together to locate the remains of missing soldiers.

About a dozen mass graves for Vietnamese soldiers have been found in the last decade, but there are thought to be hundreds more, said Nguyen Xuan Thang, who leads a group of Vietnamese volunteers doing this work. The slow, painstaking effort of triangulating information from 50 years ago was accelerated when USIP connected volunteers to American eyewitness, provided access to American archives and flew American veterans to Vietnam to help pinpoint locations, said Thang, 52.

Now, the Vietnamese are back on their own. “We will continue,” Thang said. “But we expect a lot of difficulties.”

So, too, for the families of missing American soldiers.

When Steve Morrissey, 68, decided he wanted to find the site in central Vietnam where his father’s military plane was shot down in 1972 and place his mother’s ashes there, his requests for help were turned away by various U.S. agencies, save USIP.

By the time he arrived in Vietnam, however, the USIP employee who had spent months working with him to organize the trip and secure the permissions he needed had been laid off. She helped anyway. “I couldn’t abandon him,” said To Thi Bay, 63.

So on the morning of April 11, guided by Bay, Morrissey placed the ashes of his mother, wood shavings from his son’s baseball bat, and a poem from his sister on the banks of a reservoir close to where his father died.

“I cannot imagine how I could have done this on my own,” Morrissey said. “The idea that we can’t afford, as a nation, to help families like mine, who have been promised a resolution, to help us find peace — No. I reject that.”

Hundreds of thousands of other soldiers, both Vietnamese and American, were killed in central Vietnam. Until the munitions are cleared, however, groups cannot begin to meaningfully look for the remains of those still missing.

Among them is a Vietnamese captain named Nguyen Van Du.

Hoang Khanh Hung, 77, a retired Vietnamese general who chairs the Vietnam Martyr Families Support Association, said he fought with Du in the May 1969 Battle of Hamburger Hill before Du was killed defending Quang Tri. His body was never recovered.

In the lead-up to the 50th anniversary of the end of the war, Hung said he had been thinking more of his friend, embalmed in his mind as a young man of 22. Du came from a poor family in Nghe An province. He was tall, with gentle eyes, Hung said. He fought even when he was wounded. And he shared his rations even after his skin turned pale from hunger.

“There is a responsibility of us who are living to those who are lost,” Hung said.

In visits arranged by USIP in recent years, he had met American veterans for the first time and felt they understood this too. “The memory of the dead is shared,” Hung said. It connects the two countries, he continued — “Always.”