Suzman said the foundation is advocating for its priorities in Washington, where President Donald Trump’s administration, alongside the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency, has slashed US support for global health initiatives. The government abruptly withdrew funding from the World Health Organisation, the US Agency for International Development and the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief in January. Without US funding, organisations like the WHO are looking to make sweeping cuts to programs and staff.
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“There’s no doubt that the USAID payment cutoffs that Elon drove have resulted in a dramatic increase in childhood death,” Gates said in an interview on Bloomberg TV on Thursday. “Children that would have been protected from getting HIV from their mothers during birth — that money’s been cut off.”
Other countries have also made cuts to their global aid budgets. Suzman said the foundation is working to convince the UK government, which has slashed its foreign assistance by 40 per cent, to not reduce its funding to Gavi, the international public-private partnership to help vaccinate children.
The foundation, which has a $US77 billion endowment, has gone through major changes since Gates and French Gates announced their divorce in 2021. At that time, the only board members were the couple and their billionaire friend Warren Buffett, who has contributed more than $US43 billion of his own wealth to the charity over the years.
Buffett stepped down from the board in 2021 and last year announced plans to give most of his fortune to his children for their philanthropy. He said none of his money will go to the Gates Foundation after his death.
Major changes
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In 2022, the foundation added external members to its board of trustees for the first time. Suzman joined alongside Zimbabwean billionaire Strive Masiyiwa; Thomas Tierney, the co-founder of Bridgespan Group, one of the nonprofit industry’s most powerful consultants; and Minouche Shafik, a one-time World Bank official and former president of the London School of Economics.
Months after the board was reshaped, Gates donated $US20 billion to the charity and announced plans to speed up the foundation’s pace of giving by 50 per cent to $US9 billion a year by 2026. The new goal of distributing $US200 billion by 2045 will mean giving $US10 billion a year on average.
Benjamin Soskis, senior research associate at the Urban Institute, said the Gates Foundation has always been “important not just for its actual funding but also as a model” to other billionaire philanthropists.
“This might not only shift the thinking about temporal considerations but encourage billionaires to get money off the sidelines,” said Soskis, who has received some funding from the Gates Foundation. “That would certainly be a good thing.”
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Last year, French Gates also left the nonprofit, unexpectedly stepping down as co-chair with $US12.5 billion to use for her own philanthropy, including her organisation Pivotal Ventures, which she started in 2015. By the time the couple divorced, Pivotal had invested hundreds of millions of dollars in more than 150 organisations. It uses grants as well as venture capital to focus on empowering women, including getting more females into technology jobs and elected to public office, and advocating for paid family leave.
In recent years, as new billionaire philanthropists have come on the scene with innovative ways of distributing their money, the Gates Foundation has faced more scrutiny for its bureaucracy and red tape. MacKenzie Scott, who quickly became one of the biggest philanthropists in history after her split with Amazon co-founder Jeff Bezos, proved that billionaires could disburse their money quickly and responsibly to smaller organisations typically overlooked by major charities.
Since Scott started giving money away in 2020 with a small team of consultants, she’s donated $US19.3 billion to more than 2,450 nonprofits.
Bloomberg
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