These are dark days for many foundations, but the staff of the Gates Foundation surely occupies some of the grimmest front row seats to the cruelty pageant that is Trump 2.0.
No grantmaker works more closely with a wider array of NGOs in poor countries than Gates. Many of these groups are reeling from the destruction of USAID and other U.S. global aid cuts, with devastating consequences for their vulnerable beneficiaries — costs that will be measured in myriad lives lost to preventable infectious diseases or a lack of basic healthcare.
A New York Times story last week portrayed the Gates Foundation as surprised and disoriented by the scope of Trump’s attacks on its priorities. Gates CEO Mark Suzman, the story said, “had tried to anticipate what the new government might bring, but did not foresee the scale of the change. A senior strategist for the foundation confessed to a former colleague that they had a failure of imagination.”
Bill Gates himself is said to be at a loss to understand funding cuts that seem to make no sense. The Times quotes a former Gates staffer as saying: “Bill is a rational thinker who wants to optimize for lives saved, so this chaotic world where people are acting out of spitefulness and vengeance is at odds with that.”
At the risk of sounding churlish, all I can say here is: “I told you so.”
The failure of technocratic philanthropy
Bill Gates and his foundation are emblematic of some of the weaknesses of top grantmakers that I chronicled in my recent article: “How We Got Here: Six Reasons Liberal Philanthropy is Losing the Battle for America.”
First, I wrote that foundations had long underestimated the threat that a radical right posed “to the accomplishments of philanthropy’s biggest players.” Roger that with Gates. As Suzman has acknowledged, the foundation didn’t see this attack coming. But is it really so surprising that an “America First” president who’s called the countries where Gates works “shitholes” would pull the plug on foreign aid? And if Suzman thought that could never happen because of bipartisan congressional support for USAID and the protections offered by the Impoundment Act, then he must have slept through the final days of Trump 1.0, when Republicans in Congress showed little appetite for challenging a president who’d tried to stop the peaceful transfer of power.
Second, I wrote that many big foundations have remained wedded to a “cautious, technocratic” approach, imagining that reason and data can prevail, even as nearly all policy fights now boil down to raw power struggles, the facts be damned. Tectonic shifts in media, politics and the makeup of the judiciary, I argued, “have effectively neutralized core parts of the traditional philanthropic model.”
Few foundations better exemplify a commitment to evidence-driven grantmaking than Gates. But as it’s learning, all the data in the world counts for nothing when ideologues control the government, spew lies nonstop (including some whoppers about USAID), and have little regard for the law.
It’s odd that a guy as smart as Bill Gates is so surprised by what’s happening right now. Where’s he been for the past eight years? You would think, for example, that the stubborn election denialism of Trump and the GOP would have made it clear to him how easily a good swath of America’s political leadership class would readily detach from reality, ignoring even the most ironclad facts.
The Times reports that Gates and his foundation have long tried to steer clear of politics, believing they could make progress by working with both parties. But that faith, like their belief in reason, should have been recognized as a dangerous blind spot a few years ago, once an authoritarian MAGA movement had completed its takeover of the GOP.
Why “duck and cover” doesn’t work
In the lead-up to the 2024 election, Gates and his foundation should have recognized that they had a clear choice: fight with everything they could to keep Trump from returning to office or face a potentially existential threat.
Yet the foundation didn’t invest any money (that I know of) in the top 501c3 civic participation groups working frantically to educate voters about what was at stake in the election. Along with many other big grantmakers, the Gates Foundation seemed to imagine that shaping the political environment was somebody else’s job, never mind that a shift in that environment could spell disaster for the work of the foundation and its grantees.
Bill Gates did make his largest campaign contribution ever last year, giving $50 million to Future Forward, a PAC aligned with the Kamala Harris campaign. But that sum was paltry compared to the $275 million that Musk invested to help Trump win — and, it turns out, put Musk himself in charge of destroying a lot of what Gates has built over a quarter-century. I guess Gates is not the ruthless competitor he once was, back when he made employees bring their sleeping bags to Microsoft’s offices during the browser wars.
Even stranger is how penny-wise yet pound-foolish Gates has been. He has moved over $80 billion in grants from his foundation since its inception. Yet all he could spare to protect its priorities in the political arena last year was $50 million? If he were playing the long game of prevention, as he has so often done with his global health grantmaking, Gates would have given hundreds of millions of dollars — minimum — over the past decade to fight the MAGA virus.
Lest this all sound like Monday morning quarterbacking, check out my 2018 article making some of these same points: “Why Won’t Bill and Melinda Gates Really Take on Donald Trump?”
Commenting back then on the couple’s failure to push back harder against Trump 1.0, I wrote: “Duck and cover makes sense if you’re dealing with a passing explosion. It doesn’t make sense if your core values face ongoing attack that could lead to irreversible losses.”
