On December 27, billionaire philanthropists Bill Gates and Donald J. Trump were surprised to find out that he decided to go, but Mr. Gates wanted to talk to anyone who listened to.
A man close to him said that the dinner lasted for three hours and Mr. Trump seemed happy. They talked about polio – the interests of two men – Mr. Gates was “candalously impressed” by the incoming president's interest in global health.
Probably he told the Wall Street Journal. The comments he reiterated to some friends were not good. Less than a month after the Mar-A-Lago dinner, Mr. Trump took office and immediately started working, removing the global health infrastructure at which the Mr. Gates Foundation works.
Next week, the Gates Foundation marks its 25th anniversary, with plans to celebrate its achievements, including helping to reduce global child mortality to half since 2000. In a time of self-proclaim, the foundation faces $9 billion in work every year, facing serious threats to the job and the future.
Two days after Mr. Trump freezes all foreign aid, Elon Musk begins to tear down the U.S. International Development Agency, which provides assistance globally, including vaccines, treatments and technologies created in the lab by the Gates Foundation.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration has been retaliating against institutions (universities, large law firms), thinking that this is too free. Charity has been on the edge, assuming they will be the next target of his anger. They fear the president will use his law enforcement agencies to cripple charities through investigations. They fear challenges to their tax-free status – a threat Trump explicitly exerted to Harvard when Mr. Trump refused to succumb to his demands.
At the risk-averse Gates Foundation, officials ask assistants to get nothing in emails or other written materials, especially anything Trump officials can get rid of the context. Some employees have locked their public social media accounts and transferred most of their work to telegrams or signals, encrypting messaging applications. (Speaker Alex Reid, Foundation, said employees have been encouraged to be cautious about communications.)
Mr. Gates tried to establish a cautious partnership at Mar-a-Lago, but he continued to make reasons. He has met with the White House Chief of Staff, several cabinet secretaries, the National Security Council and members of Congress.
“This is the champion we are trying to enlist,” Foundation CEO Mark Suzman said in an interview.
Mr. Gates hopes to find an ally among Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a past effort to fight malaria and child poverty. The foundation said Mr Rubio, who oversees foreign aid, has refused to meet or talk with Mr Gates since the election.
This article is based on interviews with twenty friends and consultants of Mr. Gates, current and former Gates Foundation staff and colleagues, as well as recipients of foundation grants, most of whom spoke anonymously to discuss the powerful foundation.
Current Foundation staff and others who spoke with him said the change in Washington's attitude kept Mr. Gates at sea. People who know him describe Mr. Gates as data-driven, sometimes a mistake, and they say he has been working to align the obvious new rules of the game with the way he sees the world.
“In my experience, Bill is a rational thinker who wants to optimize for saved lives, so in this chaotic world where people are acting in malice and revenge, it is related to that. “To be bombarded, in this completely exotic environment, is a double blow. ”
Severe blows and gentle reactions
Located in Seattle, the foundation was founded by Mr. Gates and his ex-wife Melinda French Gates. They divorced in 2021, but took root together until 2024. The largest philanthropy in the United States has $75 billion in donations. It employs more than 2,000 people and has offices in developing countries that rival the power of the governments they operate.
Nevertheless, it cannot run itself. It does not provide services directly, but rather fund the development of strategies and technologies and then cooperates with governments, aid agencies and the private sector to spread it.
The demolition of the USAID was the first intuition, but not the last. Subsequently, deep cuts were made at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health. Both are major funders of global health. Most buildings in the U.S.-funded global healthcare have been fundamentally reduced or destroyed.
Mr. Gates’s priorities decades of plans were phased out: malaria vaccine research; the treatment packages developed by the Foundation to deliver to malnourished children; and the Africa program that provides the Foundation’s HIV prevention technology to help invent.
The Trump administration’s decision to end support for Garvey is a particularly severe blow, and the group can help the poorest countries buy immunizations for childhood. Mr. Gates is the co-creator of Gavi, and sometimes his foundation is the largest funder.
News of the U.S. potential withdrawal from Garvey has been rumored to have the foundation’s sharpest response since the Trump administration began reducing foreign aid. CEO Mr. Suzman said on X that he was “deeply upset” about the news “if it is.” According to one of the people involved, the wording of the position has always implied the dire consequences of the cuts, and the consultants brought a debate in advance.
The foundation has been measuring in public statements, but it has been as neutral as politically as possible since Trump won the election. Some employees and allies are frustrated by Mr. Gates and the organizations that lead most of the global health work, and their response to employees’ view as disastrous levels of cuts has been diluted. In addition to posts on X, Mr. Suzman made some careful statements about Trump administration actions, such as the values of the World Health Organization and reproductive health care.
Hatred of the White House
For those who are now in Trump’s inner circle, the Gates Foundation has always been a popular punching bag. When JD Vance ran for the Senate in 2021, he called the Gates Foundation, Ford Foundation and Harvard Endowment Foundation “cancer in American society” because they obtained tax-free status to fund what he called “radical left-wing ideology.” Mr. Trump’s powerful policy adviser Stephen Miller attacked the foundation’s focus on racial equality and funding “the most hateful, toxic and Marxist ideologies.”
Then there is Mr. Musk. He is the richest man in the world and he once signed a donation commitment, a charitable commitment to run the door. Now, he mocked Mr. Gates for being on X and called his climate charity hypocritical because he believed Mr. Gates had briefly sold shares in Tesla, an electric car maker run by Mr. Musk.
As the head of such a large and influential foundation, Mr. Gates may be the head of state and cited as a stubborn non-political reason. In 2024, it changed when he donated $50 million to support Kamala Harris' presidential election.
After Mr. Trump was elected, Mr. Gates began to make changes. According to one person who heard him, in a private conversation, Mr. Trump recalled the tech billionaire he once despised him and checked Mr. Gates, as Mr. Trump said, now wants to be his friend.
People near the White House said that the government has monitored the Gates Foundation’s contact with a network of free donors called Arabella Advisors.
Mr. Suzman told friends he believed the Trump administration would target the foundation in various ways, mainly by depriving it of tax-exempt status, said two people he spoke to said.
Mr. Suzman said in an interview that the foundation’s work is non-partisan. “The work we do – keeping children from preventable deaths, trying to stop communicable diseases, and providing opportunities for the poorest and most vulnerable – is the absolute core of charitable status.”
Federal law prohibits the president from using the IRS to punish his enemies, but the waters are being tested outside conservative groups. Edward Blum, who has been in a career challenging affirmative action, filed a complaint with the IRS against the Gates Foundation. He claimed that scholarship programs targeting students of color constituted “incredible racism”, which made the foundation “ineligible for tax-free status.”
In fact, the foundation changed its scholarship admission policy a few months ago, Ms. Reed, spokesman said.
However, the foundation did not make any public changes until Mr. Blum asked for an opinion article published by the Wall Street Journal. It comes out like a cave and is portrayed in the right-wing media.
Charity leaders are also nervous about the January executive order that directed the attorney general to identify institutions, including “foundations with $500 million or more” that can be investigated based on their diversity, equity and inclusion programs.
The Gates Foundation, like other companies and institutions, has taken steps to highlight its DEI efforts. It abandoned several members of the diversity team and retired the title of major diversity, equity and inclusion officers. In a public appearance in February, Mr. Gates said that the Day plan sometimes “goes too far”.
The failure of imagination
The potential consequences of a serious disruption in the Foundation’s work are enormous – for example, the United States withdraws from the World Health Organization, which is now the largest funder of the human body. Since the destruction began in January, hundreds of scientists, aid groups and government ministers have been helping to preserve research and plans with panic. It is increasingly seen as the last player, with existing resources and commitment to help.
Mr Suzman said the Foundation’s priority advocacy efforts are to preserve the U.S. funding for Gavi and the Global Fund to fight AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria, a major organization funded by the government, philanthropy and the private sector. He also said the foundation provided an initial $30 million to African and Asian countries to assess the vulnerabilities cut by the United States Agency for International Development and plans to reorganize essential services.
But Mr. Suzman admitted that the foundation must adapt since the world's largest aid agency has been phased out and other high-income countries are also reducing aid.
In the plan around the election, foundation leaders abandoned the various ways Mr. Trump could change global aid. When the idea of a foul-provoked USDA was found to be too sensational, two people who knew the meetings said. Instead, the foundation’s plans focus on the U.S. withdrawal from the WHO and cut support for contraception and other reproductive health care.
Mr Suzman said the foundation tried to anticipate what the new government would bring, but did not foresee the scale of the change. The foundation’s senior strategist admitted to a former colleague that their imagination failed.
At the TED conference this month in Vancouver, British Columbia, Mr. Gates’ foundation passed the lapel button in the buzzword of his philanthropy. But this is someone who is inconsistent with the landscape the foundation faces: “optimism.”
