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

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