On Saturday, January 25th, the State Department office that funds the clearance of unexploded bombs, land mines, and improvised explosive devices (IEDs) sent an email to their staff announcing funding would be on hold, effective immediately. The freeze on federal funding would last for “90 days” as a review took place.
But there is a problem with suddenly defunding landmine and bomb clearance programs: It means more people could step on unexploded weapons and die.
Most years, the US spends millions of dollars cleaning up the explosives left behind by previous wars. A large portion of those explosives are manufactured in the United States. A recent State Department report claims that the United States spends more than any other country on cleaning up the explosive remnants of war. But, under Trump, that money is now on hold. And it is not clear when, or if, it will be back.
In Gaza, United Nations experts estimate that if the current ceasefire holds it will take 14 years to clear the 140-square-mile strip of explosives.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said soon after the initial freeze that “lifesaving humanitarian aid” would be exempt. But what “lifesaving aid” means is unclear. While preventing people from being killed by bombs might seem definitionally lifesaving to the average person, groups that perform the dangerous work of “demining” say that their funding has not been restored.
Unexploded ordnances (UXO) exists all over the world, said Iain Overton, director of the data-collection and advocacy group Action On Armed Violence. “If there is [an] UXO [somewhere]…every single day that [means] there’s something in a field that a child could go pick up [and], there’s a higher likelihood that child could be blown up,” he said. Overton’s organization has counted hundreds of instances of exactly that in the past decade.
Though governments are often loath to give firm numbers on how often their bombs fail to explode, a Government Accountability Office report issued after the Gulf War found that 1 in 60 American mines failed to self-destruct.
“Often, these weapon systems have ribbons attached to them, or bright colors, because you generally paint your ordnance bright colors if you’re in a military, so people know it’s something you shouldn’t drop,” Overton said. “But children are inherently curious…they see this as a toy.”
Since US bomb fell on Laos 50 years ago over 20,000 have been killed by unexploded ordnances.
The effects of UXOs reverberate for decades.
Roughly one-third of Ukraine’s land is contaminated after only two years of war. At least 170 Ukrainian farmers who have taken ad-hoc demining into their own hands have been killed, according to the Ukrainian defense ministry. And even if these explosives left behind don’t immediately kill anyone, lead and cadmium contamination from munition casings moving into the soil may continue to harm people. In Gaza, United Nations experts estimate that if the current ceasefire holds it will take at least 14 years to clear the 140-square-mile strip of explosives.
“It is a way of contaminating the land to such a degree that if you don’t have the money to rebuild, then the land just remains barren,” Overton said.
Sera Koulabdara, executive director of the demining advocacy group Legacies of War, says the effects of the US funding freeze in her family’s homeland of Laos will be heavy. Since US bomb fell on Laos 50 years ago, over 20,000 Laotians have been killed by unexploded ordnances. Only 10 percent of the bombed land in Laos has been decontaminated, Koulabdara said.
“Laos averages around 30-60 [UXO] accidents per year—the stop work order could mean higher rates of accidents and should one occur, assistance cannot be provided,” Koulabdara said. This month, one 36-year-old Laotian man was reported killed by a 50-year-old explosive. A partner organization of Legacies of War, which provides medical help to people injured in UXO explosions, is already reporting that they’re unable to assist the injured.
And, as Overton explained, even a 90-day freeze means that “smaller projects may end up getting shut down permanently.” At least one Norwegian demining NGO and one Cambodian group have reportedly paused their operations entirely. Such small organizations, Koulabdara said, “run out of money to pay their staff and risk having to re-hire and re-train in the hopeful event that the freeze is lifted.”
In fiscal year 2024, the State Department announced they would fund their Conventional Weapons Destruction Program—through which much of this work is performed—to the tune of $258 million. The State Department’s overall budget this year, by comparison, was around $50 billion; the Department of Defense’s was about 16 times that. Foreign aid makes up far less than 1 percent of the United States’ total budget.
The refusal to fund peacemaking work is “driven by a sort of Second Amendment logic infiltrating American foreign policy when it comes to disarmament,” Overton said. “Why would you care about the legacies of war when it’s all about armament and arms trade and bombing?”
