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It’s been more than eight months since U.S. President Donald Trump shocked the world by halting virtually all U.S. foreign aid, terminating billions in congressionally directed funding, and unilaterally dismantling multiple development offices in charge of overseeing the spending.

Last week, the mood among the hundreds of attendees at the InterAction Forum—one of the largest annual gatherings of foreign aid workers—alternated between gallows humor, indignation, defiance, grim resolve, and cautious hope as humanitarian and international development professionals debated the best course of action for dealing with Trump 2.0 and the administration’s apparent disdain for their field.

It’s been more than eight months since U.S. President Donald Trump shocked the world by halting virtually all U.S. foreign aid, terminating billions in congressionally directed funding, and unilaterally dismantling multiple development offices in charge of overseeing the spending.

Last week, the mood among the hundreds of attendees at the InterAction Forum—one of the largest annual gatherings of foreign aid workers—alternated between gallows humor, indignation, defiance, grim resolve, and cautious hope as humanitarian and international development professionals debated the best course of action for dealing with Trump 2.0 and the administration’s apparent disdain for their field.

“This kind of breach of trust is not the way a normal government behaves,” said Elisha Dunn-Georgiou while accepting a leadership award on behalf of the Global Health Council, a nongovernmental organization she heads that advocates on public health issues. The organization is leading a major lawsuit that challenges the Trump administration’s sweeping cuts, arguing that the U.S. government should be required to pay foreign aid contractors for work that was contractually agreed to during the Biden administration.

In pushing back against the Trump administration’s efforts to defund and undermine U.S. public support for foreign assistance, Dunn-Georgiou said it was important for aid groups to “infuse” compassion into their arguments about the importance of maintaining the United States’ traditional role as a major aid provider, while also recognizing that “protecting the [aid] systems doesn’t mean that we don’t think things need to be changed.”

Trump has already terminated nearly $13 billion in foreign aid spending. In July, Congress, with only Republican votes,

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