- Bill Gates said the effects of President Donald Trump’s USAID cuts are “devastating” but can be prevented.
- The Gates Foundation, where Gates is board chair, has worked extensively with the U.S. Agency for International Development.
- Gates’ comments come a week after he said the aid rollbacks have already led to deaths.
Bill Gates, the philanthropist and
Microsoft
co-founder, on Friday said it’s not too late to reinstate
international aid
funding that President
Donald Trump
cut off.
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The Trump administration placed staff members at the U.S. Agency for International Development, or
USAID
, on administrative leave in February. The last day of the independent agency was June 30.
“The devastating effects of these cuts are entirely preventable—and it’s not too late to reverse them,” Gates wrote in an
X post
on Friday.
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Gates referred to a post from Sam Stein, managing editor at political news site
The Bulwark
and an MSNBC contributor, containing comments from an unnamed aid worker in Africa.
The worker said shipments of HIV medication for children had not arrived in months, and existing supplies will expire within weeks. The worker also described shortages of oxygen tubes for newborn babies and medication for sexually transmitted diseases.
Last week, Secretary of State
Marco Rubio
said that “moving forward, our assistance will be targeted and time limited.” USAID was absorbed into the State Department.
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The State Department is reviewing funding from the United States President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR, a spokesperson
told NPR
in June.
Gates’ comments come a week after he said the aid rollbacks have already led to
deaths
.
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Gates, chair of the nonprofit Gates Foundation, spoke about the cuts during an address in
Ethiopia
in June.
“A lot of cuts are being made in foreign aid programs,” he said during the visit, according to a transcript of the remarks. “Some of those cuts are being made so abruptly that there are complete interruptions in trials, or medicines are still sitting in warehouses and are not available. And these cuts are something that I think are a huge mistake.”
The foundation has collaborated with USAID for years, and it has spent billions on global development and global health, having made thousands of grants.
When the foundation announced in May that Gates would give away almost all his money over the next two decades, it said that “governments around the world have announced tens of billions of dollars in cuts to aid funding.”
In addition to reducing PEPFAR and USAID commitments, Trump’s administration
has indicated
that it will end its backing of the vaccine group Gavi, which the Gates Foundation helped to set up in 1999 and has continued to support.
Last fall, Gates
gave $50 million
for the campaign of Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris.
In late December, Gates had dinner with Trump at the president’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. Rubio has declined to meet with Gates since the former Republican presidential hopeful became secretary of state in January, The
New York Times
reported.
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