Donald Trump is the face of these cuts, but the cruelty of his administration is not the only story. After a leaps upward in the 2000s, donations to global health grew very slowly throughout the 2010s. The culture of charity has also changed somewhat in the age of pledges given. There, the world's wealthiest people have pledged to donate more than half of their great destiny to charities. After Gates' divorce in 2021, Melinda eventually left the foundation to establish her own philanthropy. Longtime supporter Warren Buffett recently announced plans to leave most of his remaining fortune in the hands of charitable trusts, which his own children will manage and do not give the Gates Foundation any additional money beyond his death. After several years of slow post-Covid decline, this was a year of foreign aid, “falling off a cliff,” as Gates Foundation CEO Mark Suzman recently wrote in an Economist.
On the ground, progress was bumpy, especially in the remainder of a pandemic emergency, when many routine vaccination programs were suspended and the world's poorest countries were thrown into extreme debt pain. The proportion of the world's population living in extreme poverty fell by almost three-quarters between 1990 and 2014, but has not been reduced since.
This is when this is all time to get in to hear Gates and his team tell it – given the gap between the post-pandemic setback and the yawnings created by Trump's attacks, the target gates will be repeated once again if given the promise of biomedical tools and other life-saving innovation in the current development pipeline and AI. They are excited to talk about a world where the Gates Foundation has become unnecessary. The world sounds very appealing. But given the obstacles, can it be built?
Over the two days in late April, I talked about Gates and his philanthropy state and heritage, the achievements and disappointments so far, and the disappointments that will come. Below is an edited, condensed version of these conversations, with him in a point of sunny, detailed, confident, and sometimes brave certainty, bringing the next few decades to “an era of miracles” even more fundamental improvement than what he called it.
I. “Millions of Additional Deaths of Children”
Let's talk about the Trump administration very current tensions. The Trump administration will completely turn its back on foreign aid and leave not only millions of people but most world institutions in the world. How bad is that?
