Bill Gates’ unexpected announcement that he will spend down the assets of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation over the next twenty years is recognition by Gates that it is no longer his protection blanket. These days, Gates is more likely to be associated with Jeffrey Epstein or the botched COVID response.
Gates dropped the news through the New York Times, which emphasized that Gates is “giving away” most of his fortune. But is this really charity?
Gates gives to his own Foundation. It has functioned as the biggest public relations firm in the world, with everything calculated to make Gates look good. It also spends money on what Gates personally believes is important, not on what is necessarily in the public interest. He did, of course, put up the money but he also received significant tax advantages.
Despite its enormity, the Gates Foundation board for years consisted of only three people — Gates, his now ex-wife Melinda, and Warren Buffett, who contributes roughly half the Foundation’s assets. This close oversight suggests that the money was never really “given away,” not at least in the minds of the donors. Instead, the money was kept close to home, under their control. Buffett only resigned in 2021 at the age of 90.
Gates is blaming who else but Donald Trump for the imperative to spend all the money, citing the cuts to foreign aid and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). The only problem is that the sheer size of the Gates Foundation makes it impossible for it to simply “close up shop,” as the New York Times put it. The reality is that the Gates Foundation will continue to play an outsized and malevolent role worldwide, and especially in American domestic politics.
Neither Gates nor Buffett ballyhoo it, but the Gates Foundation at times has been the biggest contributor to a network of “dark money” organizations associated with Arabella Advisors. The money is distributed to a host of activist groups that force the domestic political debate to the far left, doom “moderate” candidates, and poison the well of civil discourse.
Bill Gates claims that his foundation has saved millions of lives, but that claim should not be taken at face value. It has a giant presence in developing health policies worldwide, easily outstripping the influence of any single government. Anyone who might take differing approaches to a range of health issues — especially vaccinations — is outflanked by Gates’ grantees, who can smother alternatives in the cradle. And of course, Gates gives to so many media outlets that he has his own echo chamber, dominating coverage of health issues.
Gates gets his way, and he is often wrong. This became all too obvious during COVID, when policies that Gates pushed, from masking to lockdowns, had devastating consequences.
Gates has said nothing about the reasons for the antipathy toward USAID. The agency had for many years been part of an American bulwark against communism, enjoying bipartisan support. After the fall of communism, the mission drifted to interfering in the internal politics of democratic countries, including the United States. We still don’t know the whole truth about the role of US government agencies in the internal politics of Ukraine for the past twenty years, but we do know that they were partisan, likely facilitating Biden family corruption and the framing of President Trump, resulting in his impeachment.
In this respect, USAID operates just like the Gates Foundation. Gather billions in resources and proclaim a noble mission, but bring with it a political agenda that permeates all that you do. Take for instance the Gates Foundation “Gender Identity Toolkit,” which serves as a guide for any entity accepting Gates money worldwide. This “Toolkit” asserts that gender results not from biology or genetics, but from social and cultural attitudes. So, if you are running an anti-hunger or health program in a Third World country, the money is laced with First World, “woke” ideology.
It is not clear that Bill Gates can save himself from himself. No amount of Trump-bashing or inflammatory claims about millions of dead children is going to rescue his reduced public standing.
Peter Flaherty is Chairman of the National Legal and Policy Center.