Philanthropist Bill Gates announced Thursday that he will wind down his massive charity in 20 years, doubling spending over that time to accelerate the work it hopes to achieve.
Gates made the announcement on the 25th anniversary of the launch of the Gates Foundation, the third-largest player in international philanthropy. He said the foundation would spend $200 billion between now and 2045, when its operations will wind down. The charity has spent more than $100 billion since its inception — on issues including global health, development, gender equity, and other work.
His announcement comes at a time when the international aid sphere is reeling from the abrupt and almost total withdrawal of the United States. Shortly after taking office in January, the Trump administration announced it was folding the U.S. Agency for International Development into the State Department, cutting much of the funding that flowed from the agency that had been set up by John F. Kennedy during his presidency. The administration also announced it was withdrawing from the World Health Organization, triggering a major funding shortfall for the body.
“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 wrote in a post on his blog, Gates Notes. The heading on the post was “The Last Chapter.”
“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,” he wrote.
The foundation’s board of directors approved the accelerated timeline with a change to the foundation’s charter, which had previously set the organization’s end date for 20 years after Gates’ death.
The funding pledged for the last 20 years actually exceeds the foundation’s current endowment, which stands at $77 billion, the foundation’s CEO, Mark Suzman, told reporters Thursday. But Gates plans to donate 99% of his remaining fortune to the foundation over the next two decades. (The foundation is not solely reliant on Gates; of the $100 billion spent so far, $43 billion came from investor and philanthropist Warren Buffett, who just announced he is stepping down as CEO of Berkshire Hathaway.)
“A few years ago, I began to rethink that [timeline]. More recently, with the input from our board, I now believe we can achieve the foundation’s goals on a shorter timeline, especially if we double down on key investments and provide more certainty to our partners,” Gates wrote.
Gates said the major focus of the foundation over its remaining years will be to help end preventable deaths of mothers and babies, ensure the next generation grows up without having to suffer from deadly infectious diseases, and lift millions of people out of poverty, putting them on a path to prosperity.
Suzman said that setting out a timeline for the foundation’s end will allow it to provide funding in a way that’s “steady, predictable, and reliable,” noting that the announcement comes at a time of “massive volatility” in global health and international aid. The upheaval is not just a result of the U.S. pullback from the global stage, Suzman said, pointing to the U.K.’s rollback in international support and proposed cuts in countries including France and the Netherlands.
“It does look likely on current trends that sadly this year, 2025, may be and is likely to be the first year of this century where preventable child mortality actually rises rather than declines,” Suzman said, with many of those deaths coming from diseases including HIV, tuberculosis, and malaria, which the world has made progress against in recent decades.
Suzman said the foundation has been making the case to governments, including the Trump administration, to continue their support for global programs, in particular Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria, which are both planning major fundraising campaigns in the near future. He said that philanthropies, even ones as large as the Gates Foundation, can’t fill the gap that occurs when countries withdraw.
The Gates Foundation has been a key player in the global effort to eradicate polio, and Suzman said the hope was still to wipe out the disease in the next three to five years. What could complicate that goal, he added, was if the U.S. pulls its support for the campaign. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is another crucial partner in the initiative, and under the Trump administration it can no longer collaborate with the WHO, one of the major agencies involved.
If the U.S. doesn’t keep up its backing, Suzman said, “that would put the fight against polio at serious risk.”
This story has been updated with comments from Gates Foundation CEO Mark Suzman.
