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Bill Gates is planning to close his philanthropic foundation in 2045, but not before he ramps up spending on health research and other humanitarian efforts.
STAT News reported Thursday that the Gates Foundation, which launched in 2000, will spend $200 billion over the next two decades—double the $100 billion it spent on global health, development, gender equity and other work during its first 25 years. The announcement comes amid President Trump’s directives to cut billions of dollars in federal research funding to universities, effectively shutter the United States Agency for International Development and withdraw the United States from the World Health Organization.
In an interview with The New York Times, Gates said some of those decisions stunned him and predicted that unless there’s a big reversal of the Trump administration’s policies, “we’ll probably go from 5 million to 6 million” child deaths a year instead of earlier projection that child deaths would decrease by one million.
“The world’s richest man has been involved in the deaths of the world’s poorest children,” he said, referring to the unelected billionaire bureaucrat Elon Musk, who runs the Department of Government of Efficiency, which ordered the decimation of USAID. “He put it in the wood chipper because he didn’t go to a party that weekend.”
Over the next 20 years, the Gates Foundation will focus its resources on achieving three goals: that “no mom, child or baby dies of a preventable cause”; that “the next generation grows up in a world without deadly infectious diseases”; and that “hundreds of millions of people break free from poverty, putting more countries on a path to prosperity.”
“There are too many urgent problems to solve for me to hold onto resources that could be used to help people. That is why I have decided to give my money back to society much faster than I had originally planned,” Gates, co-founder of Microsoft, wrote in a blog post. “I will give away virtually all my wealth through the Gates Foundation over the next 20 years to the cause of saving and improving lives around the world.”
