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.
