When Senator Andy Kim first arrived in the Senate last month, he got to spend all of two weeks holding down the committee assignments that his predecessors, disgraced former Senator Bob Menendez and former interim Senator George Helmy, once held. Now, with the 119th Congress beginning tomorrow, he’s got proper committee assignments of his own.
The new senator will sit on four committees: Commerce, Science, & Transportation; Banking, Housing, & Urban Affairs; Health, Education, Labor, & Pensions (commonly known as HELP); and Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs. Kim had already held Menendez’s old seat on the Banking Committee, but the other three are new to him.
“These committees will allow me to get to work right away on many of the most pressing issues I’ve been hearing about from New Jersey families,” Kim said in a statement. “From building more housing that people can afford to lowering healthcare costs to bringing the high-tech jobs of the future to our state, all while strengthening the national security of our nation, I promise to put politics aside and work hard to deliver real results.”
Notably, Kim is also listed higher on each committee’s roster than his fellow freshman senators, even those like Arizona’s Ruben Gallego and Delaware’s Lisa Blunt Rochester who had longer prior House tenures than him. That indicates that Kim’s headstart in the Senate – he was sworn in on December 9, one day after Helmy resigned – has given him a small boost in seniority within the freshman Senate class, something which had been an open question.
Prior to committee assignments being awarded, Kim had said he hoped to receive assignments that covered national security and economic subject areas, and he got his wish via the Commerce, Banking, and Homeland Security Committees.
Prior to arriving in Congress, Kim was a civilian advisor at the State Department and a national security advisor in the Obama White House. During his time in the U.S. House, he cultivated a national security-focused profile, serving on the House Foreign Affairs and Armed Services Committees and the Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party.
Kim had also said that he wanted to complement fellow Senator Cory Booker’s committee assignments to make sure that New Jersey got the broadest Senate representation possible; that, too, came to pass. Booker will remain on the same four committees he served on last session: Judiciary, Foreign Relations (which Menendez chaired until his indictment in 2023), Agriculture, Nutrition, & Forestry, and Small Business & Entrepreneurship.
This story was updated at 1:39 p.m. with more details about Kim’s seniority.
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