Young Kim, an immigrant from South Korea and a former longtime aide to retired House Foreign Affairs Chairman Ed Royce, is a rare figure in the House Republican caucus these days.
Like her former boss, Kim has a visible platform to speak out on international developments from her position as chair of the House Foreign Affairs East Asia and Pacific Subcommittee. She has chosen to use that pulpit to champion the importance of U.S. soft power, a position many in her party seem to be moving away from these days.
She doesn’t mince words with how she feels about the recent layoffs of some 1,300 State Department personnel, including more than 200 Foreign Service officers.
“It broke my heart,” Young said in a July interview in her Rayburn office. “With them goes the expertise, years and years of experience that may never be replaced, especially in the areas of human rights, refugee resettlement programs, working with the folks on the ground. … These are the people that spent decades building relationships.”
Kim would know. Prior to her election to the House, she spent two decades working in the Orange County district office of fellow California Republican Royce.
She met Royce when he was a state senator and joined his office in 1990. She stayed with him after he transitioned to the U.S. House, working as a community liaison and an adviser for Asian communities in his district office. The experience, along with her family’s journey from South Korea, has helped shape her perspective as a member of Congress.
Born in Incheon as the youngest of seven children, Kim emigrated with her family to Guam as a child, then later moved to Hawaii with her family. College brought her to California.
She represents a purple-tinged swath of Southern California that was once a conservative bastion where Richard Nixon was born and Ronald Reagan is still revered.
Kim, who was elected to her third term in 2024, has carved out a foreign policy focus on the Pacific region and East Asia. She often speaks of the importance of the State Department’s human rights programs aimed at vulnerable populations in East Asia, including Tibetans, Uyghurs, North Koreans and Hong Kongers. Helping Taiwan resist Chinese economic coercion and military threats is also a major focus of hers.
During the second Trump administration, Kim has walked a careful line in her responses to the White House’s massive shake-up of the U.S. foreign aid and diplomacy apparatus.
From the start, Kim has raised concerns that the U.S. would see its global influence diminished by the administration’s sweeping foreign aid cuts, citing Beijing’s willingness to replace programs previously overseen by the now-shuttered U.S. Agency for International Development such as taking over de-mining activities in Cambodia.
“[Chinese President] Xi Jinping is watching and he is waiting for the chance to fill any U.S. vacuum,” she said during a February committee hearing.
She has also criticized the administration’s push to shut down Radio Free Asia, which falls under the U.S. Agency for Global Media, calling it a trusted source “on the ground” in places like China, North Korea, Cambodia and Vietnam.
“Growing up in South Korea in the aftermath of the Korean War, I remember as a young girl seeing U.S. troops drive through my neighborhood throwing Nestlé chocolates out of their trucks. This was my first taste of the freedom the United States embodies,” she wrote in a March op-ed for the conservative National Review.
She noted that decades later when she was working in Royce’s office, part of her portfolio was legislation to make Radio Free Asia permanent.
“We heard from people in the Vietnamese and Korean communities working on human rights issues who used Radio Free Asia to get the information back into rogue nations. So we said, ‘We need to make the RFA operation permanent,’” she told Roll Call in 2021. “That’s one piece of legislation that I’m proud to have been a part of.”
Unlike most House Republicans, who have embraced efforts by the Trump administration to shutter USAID and other international development offices, Kim has offered multiple public rebukes for the way the administration abruptly froze tens of billions of dollars in previously appropriated foreign aid funds early on and then was slow to implement waivers.
At the February hearing, Kim applauded Secretary of State Marco Rubio for issuing a waiver to keep humanitarian assistance flowing amid the foreign aid cutoff while simultaneously criticizing its implementation.
“I’m also hearing many concerns regarding the lack of clarity on the scope of the waivers and challenges with getting paused programs restarted,” she said. “It’s hard to restart them if we completely turn the lights off.”
But her carefully modulated criticism has studiously avoided directly going against the wishes of President Donald Trump on key votes. For example, she voted in favor (twice) of the White House’s rescissions measure, which ended up cutting $7.9 billion in foreign aid appropriations, including $1.3 billion in humanitarian assistance and $1 billion in United Nations funding.
Instead, she raised concerns over how the State Department’s reduction-in-force was implemented, particularly given Rubio’s own background as a senator working on human rights issues.
“I’m pretty sure Secretary Rubio has a good intent in doing it because he was a champion on human rights when he was in the Senate,” Kim said.
The former Florida senator was Kim’s counterpart during the last Congress on legislation to reauthorize an expired North Korean human rights law. Kim had first worked on the issue during her time on Royce’s staff.
Though her reauthorization measure never became law, Kim said she respected Rubio for the knowledge he brought to that issue as well as his advocacy as a senator for Uyghur human rights in the Xinjiang region of China.
And so it was puzzling to Kim that Rubio as secretary would then turn around and force through sweeping cuts to many State Department offices handling the often painstaking work of human rights protections.
“He should know that these … years of capital that we built through the people-to-people relationships cannot be replaced overnight,” Kim said.
The post She saw the power of foreign aid. Now Young Kim is making her case appeared first on Roll Call.
