Billionaire Bill Gates is reportedly appealing to the White House to keep funding global health programs – and warning that his own foundation is unable to fill in gaps.
The Microsoft co-founder recently met with the National Security Council and lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, Reuters reported, citing two sources familiar with the matter.
“Bill was recently in Washington, D.C., meeting with decision-makers to discuss the life-saving impact of U.S. international assistance and the need for a strategic plan to protect the world’s most vulnerable while safeguarding America’s health and security,” a spokesperson for the Gates Foundation, told the news agency.
Gates allegedly told officials that his foundation cannot replace the role of federal assistance, and Gates Foundation directors have also said publicly that no foundation has that ability. The nonprofit’s budget last year totaled $8.6 billion – a fraction of what Trump and his team have cut in foreign aid.
The Independent’s requests for comment from the foundation were not immediately returned.
The move comes after President Donald Trump and the Department of Government Efficiency moved to dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development.
Cuts resulted in life-saving health and humanitarian services for millions collapsing, including $54 billion in foreign aid contracts.
The U.S. funded 70 percent of the global response for HIV/AIDS, according to a Vox analysis. A recent report in The New York Times found that the loss of the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief had killed a 10-year-old boy in South Sudan. Without American foreign aid for HIV prevention and treatment 1.65 million people could die within a year, it said. The World Health Organization said Monday that the supply of HIV treatments has been “substantially disrupted” in eight countries since the U.S. paused foreign aid.
Projects under the AIDS relief plan are on a review shortlist for the administration, led by Marco Rubio’s State Department, a source told Reuters, with 30 projects under consideration.
Last week, Johns Hopkins University said that its nonprofit global health affiliate Jhpiego, which works to prevent and contain the spread of HIV, malaria, tuberculosis and other deadly diseases, had been affected and that the university had been forced to wind down much of its grant-related activities.
The Gates Foundation, which was established in 2000, has committed hundreds of millions of dollars to malaria research, and HIV and sickle cell treatment.
“To date, we have committed more than $3 billion in HIV grants to organizations around the world and nearly $3 billion to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria,” the foundation’s website noted.
In his discussion, a source reportedly said Gates focused on organizations aligned with foundation priorities that are on the shortlist, as well as pushing for the support of the United Nations’ World Health Organization. Trump signed an executive order beginning America’s withdrawal from the agency on the first day of his second term. The agency’s director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, has also called on the administration to reconsider its withdrawal of funding for international aid programs.
“The U.S. administration has been extremely generous over many years. And of course it’s within its rights to decide what it supports and to what extent,” Adhanom Ghebreyesus said during a news conference in Geneva. “But the U.S. also has a responsibility to ensure that if it withdraws direct funding for countries, it’s done in an orderly and humane way that allows them to find alternative sources of funding.”
Experts say that this withdrawal will have long-term impacts.
“The irony is that we cannot know the actual impact of the retraction of aid because the executive orders have also eliminated data collection systems like the famine early warning system, so we’re unable to actually calculate the effect of the retraction of humanitarian aid,” Michael VanRooyen, director of the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, said in a statement.
With reporting from The Associated Press
