Sen. Andy Kim, former USAID intern, reflects on seismic shifts in US foreign policy

WASHINGTON — Sen. Andy Kim remembers feeling an acute sense of surrealness that overcast day in early February as he stood outside the entrance to the U.S. Agency for International Development at the Ronald Reagan Building where he, along with agency staff, were barred from entering at the order of the new Trump administration.

For the New Jersey senator, even more so than other Democrats gathered that day to protest the abrupt closure of USAID, the moment felt deeply unreal because some 20 years earlier he used to regularly enter those doors as an idealistic USAID intern. At the time, he was a newly minted college graduate committed to what he hoped would be a long career working to advance U.S. national security and foreign policy interests in the uncertain and turbulent years following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

“I literally showed up at the same door where I showed up on my very first day working for the U.S. government, and to go back there now as a U.S. senator and to be told that I cannot enter and that no USAID employees are allowed to enter was just very dark,” Kim said in a late August interview. He recalled how meaningful it had been to pass by the Berlin Wall segment installed at the Reagan building, marking the role the U.S. had played in pushing for German reunification at the end of the Cold War.

Over the following months, Kim’s bewilderment and anger with the administration deepened as he watched President Donald Trump and his cost-cutting initiative, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, move to dissolve USAID and lay off virtually its entire workforce, freeze and cancel tens of billions of dollars’ worth of congressionally approved foreign aid spending as well as fire hundreds of State Department personnel.

By abruptly dismantling the country’s largest foreign aid agency, created in the early 1960s when policymakers saw the promotion of American soft power as a critical tool in the Cold War against the Soviet Union, Kim said the Trump administration had done enormous damage to America’s reputation abroad as a trustworthy and serious partner, giving adversaries like Russia and China something of a propaganda coup.

“You cannot orchestrate it better in terms of derailing American foreign policy in a way that sets up for our competitors and our adversaries to benefit from,” said Kim, who worked in USAID’s Africa bureau on conflict mitigation issues. “That was such a sad realization to make after having dedicated my career to foreign policy, to national security — I’m part of that 9/11 generation.”

So when the news broke last week that Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought had finally done what many had been bracing for — submit a massive foreign aid spending cancellation request too late in the fiscal year for lawmakers to block — Kim said he was no longer surprised, only saddened, to watch what he views as the latest self-defeating U.S. foreign policy move.

“It’s obviously something that goes flagrantly against the ability of Congress to do our job in terms of being able to set the budget, but also it is intentionally to try to prevent us from actually being able to engage with this request, doing it so late right before the end of the fiscal year,” Kim said. “There is a reason why this hasn’t been done in nearly half a century.”

Pocket rescission is latest step in foreign policy realignment

A so-called “pocket rescission” is a controversial and legally untested theory that the president can cancel congressional appropriations in contravention of the 1974 Impoundment Control Act if the rescissions request is submitted less than 45 days before the end of the fiscal year. While previous presidents, including Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, used pocket rescissions to terminate federal funding, the canceled funds numbered in the low millions of dollars and there were extenuating budgetary reasons.

The $4.9 billion foreign aid rescissions package the White House sent to Congress on Aug. 28 is much larger by an order of many magnitudes. It includes the cancellation of $3.2 billion in development assistance funds formerly overseen by USAID that had been planned for poverty reduction activities, such as improving agriculture practices and adapting to climate change. But OMB in its notice to Congress said the funding was “wasteful” and “conflicted with American values,” while “providing no clear benefit to Americans.”

It’s the second foreign aid rescissions package the White House has sent to Congress this summer. In July, lawmakers narrowly approved an administration request to cancel $7.9 billion in international assistance as well as $1.1 billion in grants for NPR and PBS.

Democrats and foreign aid advocates have strongly criticized the latest rescissions request targeting international aid. They point to efforts by U.S. adversaries to step up their geopolitical influence, including President Xi Jinping of China, who hosted Russian President Vladimir Putin and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in a high-profile summit this week that included other national leaders from Southeast and Central Asia.

“This is not the time for America to pull back on the global stage,” said Liz Schrayer, who leads the bipartisan U.S. Global Leadership Coalition, which lobbies Capitol Hill for foreign aid spending. “This weekend’s Putin-Modi-Xi summit sent a clear signal that our rivals are eager to fill power vacuums.”

Schrayer also cited China’s construction of a $2.15 billion cross-border railway project in East Africa and its effort to drive Chinese exports to Africa toward $200 billion for the first time this year.

Congressional Republicans have mostly stayed silent or defended the foreign aid cuts put forth by the Trump administration.

Kim, who worked at USAID on a Truman Scholarship, a prestigious federal award that supports undergraduates pursuing public service careers, said he strongly rejects the administration’s argument that foreign aid doesn’t serve U.S. interests.

“At no point did I ever conceptualize this work as just charity from the United States,” said Kim, who would go on to hold positions at the State Department, Pentagon and the White House National Security Council before his successful 2018 election to the House, where he served until he won his Senate seat in 2024.

“It was very clear to me the role that it played within the foreign policy tools we have, alongside our diplomacy, alongside our defense, and just how critical this work was to building up American leadership.”

Kim recalled how awed he had been during his year at USAID by the specially trained crisis response teams and their work in Malawi to counter a growing famine and in Indonesia after the devastating 2004 tsunami.

“It benefited us that other countries thought they needed to work with us and engage with us on different issues because it gave us the ability to have a say if we wanted to, anywhere in the world,” he said.