With rumors spiking in Washington that President Donald Trump is about to radically reshape the U.S. Agency for International Development, Democrats in the capital are scrambling to figure out how to respond.
One senator went there directly: On Monday morning, Sen. Andy Kim tried to get inside the agency to meet with its acting administrator, Jason Gray.
After less than 10 minutes in the lobby and in the presence of four security officials, Kim was told he could not meet with Gray or any member of his staff.
“It wasn’t what I was hoping for, but frankly, it was what I expected,” Kim said while walking out of the building.
Kim’s visit came just moments before Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced he is now acting administrator of USAID.
Kim’s first position with the federal government was in that building as an intern for USAID’s Africa Bureau in 2004. He took the Federal Center metro and walked into that same lobby every day. Now a first-term senator, Kim came back on Monday looking for answers on the future of the agency tasked with dispensing billions of dollars around the world for humanitarian purposes like alleviating poverty, responding to disasters and strengthening democracy abroad.
As of Monday morning, USAID’s website remained down. Dozens of USAID officials have been put on leave. All foreign aid was put on pause for 90 days under a sweeping executive order in Trump’s first days in office. The ramifications are broad even outside the agency, where nongovernmental organizations contracting with USAID are under threat of shuttering or facing widespread furloughs and terminations from the sudden halting of funding.
The conflict came to a head when Department of Government Efficiency officials tried to enter USAID headquarters on Saturday night. Two top security officials at the agency were put on administrative leave for refusing to allow the DOGE staffers in.
Eventually the officials were allowed to access the headquarters, and many Democratic senators have raised concerns around whether the officials accessed classified information.
“What I’m worried about is it’s like the tip of the iceberg we can see, but what else is happening?” Kim told NOTUS as he walked to USAID headquarters.
“There’s so little understanding of who these people are,” he said.
When Kim arrived at the building, he checked in at the front desk and was asked twice by security to show his identification. On the security desk were printouts of an email sent Monday morning to USAID personnel telling them not to go into headquarters and instead remain home.
The security guard told Kim they had been given instructions to turn away USAID employees who tried to enter.
A second security official then came to the lobby, accompanied by Homeland Security police. Kim had the same request: He wanted to meet with Gray, or if not him then his chief of staff or someone from his office.
The guard then checked the identification of Kim’s staff (and the NOTUS reporter who accompanied them). After waiting in the lobby for several more minutes, two security officials came back down. They told Kim that Gray was in a meeting and couldn’t meet with him.
After Kim pressed further, saying he’d wait until the meeting was over, the security official told Kim that Gray was in the building, though he hadn’t actually seen him.
The official then told Kim his staff would be in touch. He wouldn’t give Kim a name or number for who would be in touch with him. They added that an official congressional notification would be sent to members of Congress at some point Monday.
More Democratic members of Congress are expected to visit or stand outside USAID later on Monday.
Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee sent a letter to Rubio on Sunday demanding answers for how the individuals were able to access USAID and classified materials.
“The potential access of sensitive, even classified, files, which may include the personally identifiable information (PII) of Americans working with USAID, and this incident as a whole, raises deep concerns about the protection and safeguarding of matters related to U.S. national security,” the letter read.
The senators requested an immediate update from Rubio on who the people were, what they were seeking to access and whether any review is underway on potential unauthorized access to classified materials.
Kim, who has also worked for the State Department, told NOTUS that a potential folding of USAID into State would be disastrous. Not only does it require congressional approval, which no one from the Trump administration has publicly even asked for, but he said it would likely mean massive cuts in funding for development.
“As we like to assert, we are the most powerful nation in the world, that power isn’t intrinsic,” Kim told NOTUS. “It comes not just from the size of our GDP or the size of our military, but it’s from our relationship with our nations.”
“That’s what I get frustrated by. So often foreign assistance is seen as charity. It’s not,” he said. “Ultimately, this is a tool for our power, our strength.”
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Katherine Swartz is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.