Shortly after taking office in 1989, President George H. W. Bush signed a presidential finding renewing the CIA's legal authority to conduct covert operations in Afghanistan, but the country ranked low on the fledgling administration's priorities; Bearden recalled a conversation about Afghanistan in which President Bush asked: "Is that thing still going on?" Congress was losing interest in Afghanistan as well, slashing the CIA's Afghan budget to $280 million for fiscal 1990 with additional cuts in fiscal 1991. In late 1990, the U.S. suspended most aid to Pakistan as a consequence of Pakistan's continued progress towards developing a nuclear weapon, as legally required by an amendment to the Foreign Assistance Act. Finally, after Soviet hardliners tried to oust Gorbachev in a failed August 1991 coup attempt, triggering a series of crises that culminated in the dissolution of the Soviet Union, President Bush's secretary of state James Baker reached an agreement with his Soviet counterpart Boris Pankin for both sides to cease sending weapons to either the mujahideen or Najibullah. This agreement—honored by the new government of Russia—came into force on January 1, 1992, at which point the Soviet Union no longer existed. While the CIA therefore played no direct role in the fall of Kabul (and Afghanistan's subsequent descent into civil war between rival mujahideen factions) later that year, the cessation of external assistance was clearly much more devastating to Najibullah than to the mujahideen (especially when combined with erstwhile Najibullah ally Abdul Rashid Dostum's nearly-simultaneous defection to the latter).