The bill gates problem, p.17
The Bill Gates Problem, page 17
Another Gates Foundation ally in this political contest was Rajiv Shah, a former high-level director at the foundation who had become the head of the U.S. Agency for International Development—and the face of the government food aid program Gates was pushing. Shah is one of a never-ending cast of characters who have moved through the perpetual-motion revolving door between the Gates Foundation and Capitol Hill (especially during Democratic administrations).
The only other place on earth where Gates has financial influence similar to that in Washington, DC, is Geneva, the other seat of power governing the foundation’s sprawling empire. Switzerland houses some of Gates’s most important global health public-private partnerships—Gavi; the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria; the Medicines for Malaria Venture (MMV); the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN); the Foundation for Innovative New Diagnostics (FIND); and the Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiative (DNDi)—and it’s home to the World Health Organization. These organizations have claimed nearly $13 billion from the foundation, making Geneva the number one destination for Gates’s philanthropic giving, slightly ahead of DC.
Some of these Swiss organizations also have a presence in Washington. The Geneva-based Gavi keeps an office in DC, on Pennsylvania Avenue, and spends millions of dollars lobbying Congress, including on legislation that directly impacts Gavi’s budget. For example, Gavi lobbied on the 2022 Consolidated Appropriations Act, which included a $3.9 billion pool of money to be made available for foreign aid projects aimed at public health. The legislation specifically cited Gavi’s eligibility for the funds.
Many of Gates’s closest charitable partners—MMV, AGRA, the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI), GAIN, the TB Alliance, and Aeras—also lobby the U.S. Congress, spending millions of dollars in the hope of bringing billions of dollars in federal tax money into their programs. The effect is to massively subsidize Gates’s flagship projects.
Gates’s political activities are not limited to the United States. In 2022, Politico and the German news outlet Die Welt examined how the Gates Foundation and its closest partners in the pandemic response, Gavi and CEPI, pressured U.S. and European governments to commit billions of dollars to support their work on Covid-19. This included a personal phone call between Bill and Melinda French Gates and German chancellor Angela Merkel in 2021. The outlet also reported, “In Germany, the Gates Foundation spent €5.7 million, about $5.73 million, in 2021 lobbying various agencies and officials in part to increase German support for the global vaccine effort. The foundation relied on 28 staff members registered to lobby in the German Parliament as well as specialists hired from the Brunswick Group, an advisory and consulting group.” Politico, however, did not attempt to reconcile evidence of Gates’s lobbying with the foundation’s official position: “A spokesperson for the foundation said U.S. law prohibits private foundations from engaging in lobbying.”
This is where federal regulations seem to dissolve into a gray area. The foundation has its own internal guidance that asserts its right to “influence regulations, administrative actions, or non-legislative policies” and “judicial decisions” in the United States and to “discuss legislative proposals or legislative actions with legislators and government officials regarding matters related to jointly-funded programs.” Because so much of the foundation’s work runs through projects jointly funded with governments—that is, public-private partnerships—this would appear to give the foundation carte blanche to effectively engage in lobbying across much of its portfolio, apparently both at home and abroad.
What we can’t verify is how much money the foundation spends pressuring governments. Nor can we tally up the results of this intense fund-raising effort—the total taxpayer dollars, from nations around the globe, that have gone into subsidizing Gates’s philanthropic projects. These questions are difficult to answer comprehensively because in the United States we do not regulate philanthropy as a political activity, like lobbying or campaign contributions. That means we don’t require it to make public-facing disclosures about its political spending. And we usually pretend that the Gates Foundation’s endless meetings with government officials are not aimed at influence peddling.
Many of the foundation’s charitable grants are explicitly directed at efforts to “educate” and “inform” and “engage” policy makers, according to the brief grant descriptions the foundation publishes. For example, Gates has donated more than five million dollars to the Kyle House Group, including a grant “to educate policymakers on the impact of US foreign assistance programs on global health and development.” Kyle House is a registered lobbying firm, but if it’s using Gates’s money to “educate” and “engage” policy makers—and not to push a specific legislative bill—this isn’t considered lobbying. And, of course, Gates’s donation was not specifically earmarked for lobbying.
Many organizations engage in this same kind of political advocacy—not lobbying on a specific piece of pending legislation but pushing elected leaders to be responsive to a certain platform. The reason the Gates Foundation is different is that we don’t generally recognize that it is a political actor, or understand how much influence it has—shaping billions of dollars in aid spending and then positioning itself to manage how that money is spent. As taxpayer dollars flow into Gates’s sprawling network of surrogates, who is evaluating and investigating whether this is a prudent, responsible, and effective use of public funds?
One prominent critic of the multibillion-dollar foreign aid complex that fuels Gates’s work is Dambisa Moyo, a Zambian-born, Harvard-trained economist and author of the 2009 book Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa. She argues that the feel-good, celebrity-driven calls for more aid and charity hurt Africa by creating a dependency on foreign donors. “Fundamentally, I don’t think Africa needs more aid. I think it needs less aid,” Moyo noted in a 2009 interview:
It needs governments to be made accountable to the domestic citizenry, and not accountable to donors. Africans stand in the hot African sun to elect their leaders, and it is those leaders who are charged with the responsibility of delivering social services and being accountable to their people. Clearly there was a vacuum that has allowed the celebrity culture to seep in, but it would seem to me that no society would appreciate their whole policy and the future of their children to be dependent on celebrities that actually don’t live in these contexts.
I think the whole aid model emanates from a pity for Africa, a sense that Africa cannot do it, cannot achieve growth.
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Moyo, who shares at least some dimensions of Bill Gates’s pro-capitalist, pro-corporate worldview—she’s held board positions at Barclays, 3M, Chevron, and Condé Nast—notably became Bill Gates’s archenemy for a time. Though her book does not specifically interrogate, or even mention, the Gates Foundation, Gates took her arguments extremely personally. And in an apparently unscripted live Q&A at a public event in 2013, he struggled to maintain his composure while responding to an audience question about Moyo’s writing.
“That book actually did damage generosity of rich world countries. You know, people have excused various cutbacks because of it,” a visibly agitated Gates said. “Having children not die is not creating a dependency, having children not be so sick they can’t go to school, not having enough nutrition so their brains don’t develop. That is not a dependency. That’s an evil thing and books like that—they’re promoting evil!”
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IN 2016, THE Gates Foundation put up funding for an all-expenses-paid weeklong trip, at $6,000 a head, for a group of U.S. congressional staffers to travel to Senegal. When they arrived, a member of the Gates Foundation staff was among the first points of contact, hosting a dinner that evening—after they first made an excursion to the Island of Gorée, a UNESCO World Heritage site. The agenda for the trip alerted the congressional staffers to how special this visit was: “President Obama visited the site in 2013; before him, high-profile figures like Pope John Paul II and Nelson Mandela did the same.”
In the days ahead, the congressional travelers would tour Senegal’s countryside, visiting a rice mill and a biogas energy facility, while also taking meetings with U.S. and Senegalese government officials. Staff dined in hotels and socialized into the night with Peace Corps volunteers, according to the itinerary.
The goal of the trip, organized by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, was to help Congress understand the importance of a U.S. government aid program called Feed the Future—how its “principles are applied, how the initiative’s programs relate to other U.S. development investments, and how partners and beneficiaries perceive the impacts of those programs.” And congressional staffers were told, in no uncertain terms, that this aid project was working: “Senegal’s portfolio furnishes a snapshot of what Feed the Future programs seek to accomplish worldwide.”
What congressional staffers may not have realized is that the funder of their trip had a keen financial interest in the continuation of Feed the Future, which was working on a $47 million partnership with Gates’s most prominent agricultural initiative, the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA). According to a federal database of grants and contracts, one year after the Gates-funded excursion, the federal government awarded an additional $60 million to AGRA.
This money didn’t flow directly from this Gates-sponsored excursion, but by having the attention of congressional staffers for an entire week, and offering them a free trip, the Gates Foundation was, nevertheless, able to carefully present a narrative that helped advance its political goals. Though Gates’s agricultural interventions in Africa have been widely criticized by academic researchers as ineffective and by African farmers as neocolonial (as we’ll explore in detail later in the book), these perspectives cannot get the same visibility or traction with Congress as Gates’s talking points. That’s because there is no multibillionaire funding congressional trips to show their side of the story. The Gates Foundation can afford to send members of Congress on trips in ways that most organizations cannot—and it might even be one of the largest private funders of congressional travel. A search through public disclosures shows that the Gates Foundation has served as a sponsor for the following:
a $14,000 trip for Arizona representative Kyrsten Sinema (now senator) to travel to Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2016 to learn about “maternal, newborn and child health issues,” with Sinema and other travelers staying at the Serena Hotel in Kigali, which boasts of its “5-star comfort”;
a $14,000-per-head trip for Minnesota representative Erik Paulsen and his daughter to travel to Kenya in 2016 to get “direct insight on how U.S. investments are working to improve global health”; Maryland representative Andy Harris and his daughter also came on the trip, reporting that their trip cost only $7,500 per head;
a $25,000 trip in 2014 to send Illinois representative Mike Quigley and his wife to Cambodia to learn about child and maternal health;
an $18,000 trip to send Illinois representative Aaron Schock and his father to Ethiopia in 2010 on business class flights to learn about maternal and child health;
$17,000 to send California representative John Garamendi and his spouse on business class flights to Tanzania in 2015 “to discuss security, terrorism, and international relations.” According to the itinerary, Melinda French Gates presided over a roundtable on “putting women and girls at the center of development”;
a $9,000-a-head itinerary to send a fleet of Republican legislators—Ann Wagner, Susan Brooks, and Carol Miller and her spouse—to Guatemala in 2019, a trip that included chartered helicopters “to minimize transfer times between sites and maximize time for programming in-country”; and
a $14,000-per-person trip for California representative Barbara Lee and her daughter-in-law to travel to Uganda in 2012 “to showcase the positive reach and scope of U.S. investments in programs that improve family health outcomes and save lives for women and girls in Uganda.”
The examples go on and on—and all of this is legal.
It may surprise you—it certainly surprised me—but wealthy interests are allowed to sponsor educational trips for members of Congress and their staff. It’s a clear exercise of money in politics, and, troublingly, it sometimes can be difficult to follow the money.
In 2008, a Washington, DC, think tank named the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) announced that it had received “the single largest foundation grant … in its history” from the Gates Foundation to start a new program called the Center for Global Health Policy. A few years later, the new project sent congressional staffers on business class flights for a weeklong learning tour about HIV/AIDS in South Africa. The four staffers were joined on the trip by a senior program officer of the Gates Foundation, Tom Walsh, according to the itinerary. Another Gates staff member, Dr. David Allen, joined the group once they touched down in South Africa.
Though Gates was funding CSIS’s Center for Global Health Policy at the time it organized this trip, though the topic and goals of the trip aligned with the Gates Foundation’s agenda, and though Gates’s representatives explicitly participated in the event, the public-facing ethics disclosure forms surrounding the trip do not report the Gates Foundation as a funder or sponsor. Throughout 2013 and 2014, the CSIS Center for Global Health Policy sponsored trips for congressional staffers to Zambia, Ethiopia, and Burma—trips that appear in line with the Gates Foundation’s agenda and that included foundation staff. Yet the congressional disclosure forms CSIS filed did not name Gates as a sponsor.
It took repeated inquiries to CSIS over three months to get what was essentially a nonresponse to questions about why the Gates Foundation was not disclosed in ethical filings: “CSIS is a transparent institution,” noted Andrew Schwartz, chief communications officer for the group. “Our funders are listed on our website and each project and funded work that we produce. It is against our policy to disclose itemized funding for our research.”
Craig Holman, a government affairs lobbyist for Public Citizen, questions whether a loophole is being exploited. He said current disclosure rules require that Gates be listed as a sponsor in ethics filings only if the foundation explicitly earmarked charitable donations for Congressional travel and participated in planning the trip. “The congressional rules assume that a nonprofit foundation that has no role in planning the trip is not funding the trip for influence-peddling purposes and therefore need not be disclosed,” Holman noted. “Clearly, this can be a false assumption in many cases and poses a loophole in the travel rules. If any entity is earmarking funds for congressional trips, whether or not they play a role in planning the trip, they should be … subject to disclosure, and let the public decide if there is any undue influence peddling going on.”
What the questionable disclosures suggest is another problem at the heart of American politics: dark money. Monied interests not only have the loudest voice, but their financial influence is often hidden from the public. If the Gates Foundation’s money is being used to pay for expensive trips for members of Congress and their family and staff, in ways that advance the foundation’s agenda, shouldn’t we have crystal-clear transparency about the details—the total money the Gates Foundation has spent on such projects, who is traveling on Gates’s dime, what the travel entails, and how the trips advance the foundation’s political agenda?
Some readers might question what harm could come from the foundation’s efforts to get Congress interested in a topic like HIV/AIDS. This misunderstands the financial and political stakes at hand. The foundation has very specific, very narrow, and often very wrong ideas about what public health priorities should be. Do we focus on prevention or treatment? Do we spend our limited resources on building clinics or trying to create a new vaccine? Do we pursue aid programs that enrich Big Pharma, or that challenge Big Pharma? How do we decide? By funding congressional travel, alongside other activities, the foundation can help shape billions of dollars in aid spending, which affects the bottom lines of major pharmaceutical companies and the lives of millions, if not billions, of poor people. Yet the taxpaying public has few sight lines into Gates’s political machinery.
One database of congressional travel disclosures, LegiStorm, cites the Gates Foundation as the fortieth-largest funder of congressional trips through mid-2022, having put up $467,269.54 to underwrite ninety-seven trips (mostly for Republicans). Yet Gates’s actual funding of trips is almost certainly many times larger. For example, the foundation reports donating $11 million to CARE’s “Learning Tours” program, which describes itself as taking “policymakers, government leaders and change-makers on short, intensive trips where they meet the people whose lives are being transformed through U.S. investments.” CARE reports having taken more than 150 members of Congress and their staff on trips, along with dozens of journalists and government administrators. “CARE knows that when leaders witness the best U.S. foreign investments have to offer, up close and in person,” the group’s website notes, “they go home inspired, motivated and challenged to make change happen back in the U.S.”
Another group that organizes trips with the foundation’s money (alongside many other projects) is the Aspen Institute, a Washington, DC, think tank and recipient of more than $100 million from Gates. This includes a 2007 charitable grant for $664,000 “to inform an on-going group of senior committee staff on education policy issues and provide an opportunity to reflect and discuss in a neutral setting and build a collaborative working relationship.” During the course of this grant, Aspen organized a trip for House and Senate staffers, described very similarly to Gates’s grant: “a neutral forum to aid education policymakers in their efforts to improve student achievement.”
