The U.S. State Department office that funds the clearance of unexploded munitions around the world has asked humanitarian demining organizations funded by the department to cease operations “effective immediately,” according to a surprise announcement early Saturday.
The email, sent at 6:26 a.m. by Karen R. Chandler, head of the State Department’s Office of Weapons Reduction and Abatement, said the halt was “consistent with the president’s executive order on re-evaluating and realigning United States foreign aid.”
Officials who handle financial grants to the nonprofit demining groups will offer further guidance on Monday, Ms. Chandler’s email said. She ended by thanking the nonprofits “for the important work you do making communities safe.”
Ms. Chandler did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Saturday.
The announcement follows comments made by Secretary of State Marco Rubio on his first day of work on Tuesday, when he said that a total halt in foreign aid was meant “to ensure that our foreign policy is centered on one thing, and that is the advancement of our national interests.”
Mr. Rubio said those interests had been “clearly defined” through the campaign of President Trump as “anything that makes us stronger or safer or more prosperous.”
It is unclear whether Mr. Rubio or the president understands that the presence of unexploded munitions threatens the lives of Americans as well, given that U.S. troops are often killed or wounded by hazardous battlefield munitions such as dud submunitions from cluster weapons. Such ordnance killed as many U.S. military ground troops during the 1991 Persian Gulf War as were lost to enemy fire.
In the State Department’s latest annual report on its global efforts to eliminate unexploded munitions, an official wrote that the program being halted by the Trump administration “enhances food security by helping to revitalize agricultural fields” in countries like Sri Lanka and Vietnam, and cited extensive contamination in Ukraine, where the war with Russia “has littered massive swaths of the country with land mines, unexploded ordnance and improvised explosive devices.”
The official noted that these explosive hazards exacerbated food insecurity by blocking access to farmland and impeding the restoration of damaged agricultural storage and processing facilities.
“Clearing land mines from Ukraine’s agricultural land is directly linked to global food security and is a prerequisite for Ukraine’s recovery,” the official wrote, adding that the department’s work elsewhere was intended to help displaced persons and refugees return home safely, and facilitated economic security and prosperity.
The report claims that the United States is “the world’s top supporter of conventional weapons destruction,” and has provided nearly $5.1 billion in assistance to more than 125 countries for clearing unexploded munitions since 1993.
The unexpected stoppage of programs for arms removal and destruction follows a legacy of flip-flops on weapons-related policies since Mr. Trump first took office in 2017.
Less than a year after Mr. Trump’s first inauguration, Secretary of Defense James N. Mattis ordered his deputy, Patrick M. Shanahan, to reverse a longstanding policy on cluster weapons just months before it would have permanently eliminated them from the Pentagon’s arsenal, with Mr. Shanahan later citing the threat from North Korea as the reason for keeping them.
President Joseph R. Biden Jr. never rescinded that policy change during his four years in office, and sent aging cluster warhead ATACMS missiles and 155-millimeter DPICM artillery shells to Ukraine to use against Russian and North Korean troops.
In 2020, the Defense Department under Mr. Trump reversed another longstanding policy that had restricted the Pentagon from using anti-personnel land mines outside the Korean Peninsula since 1996 that was adopted by President Bill Clinton.
The Biden administration changed course on that policy in June 2022, essentially re-establishing the Clinton-era stance, only to severely undercut it by providing Ukraine with 155-millimeter artillery shells that release “nonpersistent” anti-personnel mines in November 2024.
The long-term effect of Ms. Chandler’s request on the many humanitarian demining organizations her office funds is unclear.
“We are assessing the implications of the U.S. government’s review of foreign aid,” Shari Bryan, the U.S. director of the British-based demining nonprofit Mines Advisory Group, which receives State Department funding and shared the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize for its work to ban the use of anti-personnel land mines, said in a statement to The Times on Saturday. “Our work has enjoyed strong and bipartisan support from all U.S. government administrations, including President Trump’s first administration, because of its alignment with U.S. national interests, and we hope to work with the new Trump administration in the years ahead.”
Chris Whatley, the U.S. director of the HALO Trust, a British American demining group with operations around the world, said his organization’s efforts directly advanced the stated priorities of the secretary of state and the president.
“Fundamentally, this pause in foreign assistance is about evaluating whether they align with President Trump’s stated goals of advancing American security and prosperity,” Mr. Whatley said in an interview on Saturday. “We are of the view that demining advances those core priorities.”
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