Gates Foundation Is Rattled by Trump’s Threat to Its Mission

The largest funds—Gates, Ford, Hewlett, Rockefeller, Lilly, Bloomberg, Getty, Wellcome, a roll-call of past and present tycoons—have a scale which pushes them towards conservatism. They tend to be attracted to a narrow problem-solving approach, using data and evidence to address specific issues which are seen as separate from the broader structural

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In the United States, more and more of these services and systems have been underfunded publicly (by taxes), and so philanthropy has stepped in. These are two sides of the American historical coin: we underinvest in our shared public systems while we celebrate individual generosity. This places a burden on voluntary acts and giving that is both too

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So philanthropy under this rubric is not about creating sanctuaries from or alternatives to the demands of capitalism. The benevolence, if you can call it that, is in giving people from the underclass a chance to succeed by its rules. With, of course, very patronizing and constraining surveillance from the funder. It’s neoliberal brainworms all the... See more

The bearers of these protocols were, ironically, rushing in to shape the solution of problems that their methods were complicit in causing. Corporate types from the energy and financial industries were drafted into charitable projects to protect the world from climate change, even if their way of thinking about profit, as practiced in their day job

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Similar benefits accrue in the not-for-profit world. At the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, a $20 billion start-up, OKRs deliver the real-time data that Bill Gates needs to wage war against malaria, polio, and HIV. Sylvia Mathews Burwell, a Gates alumna, ported the process to the federal Office of Management and Budget and later to the Departm

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