How Bill Gates can spend $200 billion in 2025
It’s easy if you try
Bill Gates has announced that he will spend his Foundation's endowment by 2045 and close the institution at that time. The Foundation's endowment was about US$77 billion at end-2024. From that base (call it US$80 billion in round terms) Gates has said that he will make gifts to the Foundation large enough to fund programs of US$200 billion from 2025 through 2045, in other words about twice what his Foundation has invested since its creation in 2000.
Some have questioned Gates' good faith about this promise. Others have raised practical questions about how the money can be spent at an annual rate (US$10 billion) roughly twice that of the Foundation's historical rates (US$5 billion). Others have asked about the impact of the new money given the mixed record of some of the Foundation’s work. There are surely others intent on grabbing a piece of the Foundation before it goes away, each with some “Yes, but …” objections.
This essay suggests four ways for Gates to commit $200 billion in 2025 and to thereby answer questions about the honesty, speed, and potential impact of his promise to not die a wealthy man.
Getting impact from the US$200 billion demands focus
Getting impact from the US$200 billion demands focus in a small number of areas. I propose four: (1) public services in Washington state; (2) debt relief to poor countries; (3) response to global public health emergencies; and (4) development of next generation vaccines.
The first use of the current endowment of some US$80 billion is to recognize that Gates has benefited from tax subsidies in the US and in his home state of Washington.[1] One path to repay a small part of those subsidies is to commit $20 billion to the state of Washington. This could be done overnight from the Foundation's liquid assets. A transfer of US$20 billion (Table below: “How to spend $ 200 billion before Christmas”) in present value terms to the state of Washington, in a fund returning 5 % annually over a 6-year period, would add about $3.9 billion to Washington state's budget in those six years. To give an idea of the importance of a Gates transfer to Washington, press accounts (https://www.cascadepbs.org/politics/2025/04/breakdown-washingtons-new-78b-two-year-state-budget) indicate the state is imposing US$2.7 billion in service cuts over the next two-year budget period. The total transferred to Washington, in nominal terms, would be US$23.6 billion over the 6 years of the hypothetical agreement with Gates.
The larger part of committing the current endowment would be to transfer $75 billion to the International Development Association (IDA), which is the low-income country window of the World Bank Group. Repayments of principal and interest to IDA in the next three-year replenishment period (2025-2027, known as IDA-21) are about US$36 billion. Projecting similar repayments from poor countries to IDA in the next three-year replenishment (2028-2030, known as IDA-22), Gates could give US$75 billion, again in present value nominal terms, to IDA. That US$75 billion invested by IDA over 6 years at 5% would allow annual disbursements of US$14.8 billion, for a total nominal commitment of US $89 billion to IDA. This gift would relieving some of the debt burden on poor countries and allow them to spend more on health, education, water, and sanitation.[2]
The World Health Organization (WHO) allocated $10-12 billion to global health emergencies from 2010-2023. It spent about US$4 billion on COVID and other emergencies in 2022 and 2023. WHO's work on health emergencies is chronically underfunded and is likely to be more so as other pandemics strike. The Gates Foundation, which has done path-breaking work in funding health services research and vaccine development, could agree to commit a total of US$53 billion to WHO in an annual nominal amount of US$2.6 billion from 2026 through 2025.
Gates could do the same for the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI) to which he has long been a generous donor: commit US$53 billion over the next 20 years in an annual nominal amount of US$2.6 billion.
Gates should drop other fields of support
I expect the usual piteous wails of distress about dropping some work, notably in agriculture, gender, and education, so let me give some reasons about why Gates can leave such work to others.
• The Gates Foundation impact in agriculture has been weak, as we know from independent evaluations of its roughly US$1 billion support to the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) over the past 20 years; and from impact studies of work done by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) since its various pointless reorganizations beginning in 2009. African member countries can finance AGRA. The CGIAR will be more effective with less money and without Gates’s appointees in its management. A new commitment to IDA debt relief will, moreover, allow African governments to spend the foregone debt service on their own priorities, including agriculture.
• Most of Gates’s support to education has been in the United States. A RAND Corporation evaluation of the Foundation's "Intensive Partnership for Effective Teaching Initiative" (https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR2242.html) found little effect on student achievement and graduation rates. The Foundation has since shifted its education work to other initiatives. Public spending on education in the US is not lacking for money and the loss of Gates money, whatever it adds up to, can be met from other sources.
• The direct impact of Gates Foundation support to women through its education and agriculture windows has not been strong, to put it diplomatically. That support should be left to others. Abandoning Gates funding to education and agriculture support does not mean that efforts to help overcome historical discrimination against women must stop. New investments in global debt relief, in response to global health emergencies, and in vaccines are effective forms of assistance to women. Support to malaria vaccines and to HIV treatments are vital agricultural investments through their effects on the health of the farm labor force; they are, moreover, investments that allow women to reduce the time burden of caring for the sick. The refusal to accept these facts and the insistence on special gender windows is, to some extent, special pleading by those who run such programs. In the event, Gates' former wife is wealthy and she can continue funding direct support to gender programs.
Why a simple model can work
• It is easy to explain to the public;
• It evades, to some extent, self-interested counterattacks from the aid bureaucracy which will cause delays at best and abandoned commitments at worst;
• The commitments can be made unbreakable, something that cannot be said of the rich countries’ contributions to the UN system;
• Recipient institutions (Washington State, IDA, WHO, GAVI) do not have to be created anew, have existing governance, financial and project management systems, will incur small marginal administration costs, and can use the new funds well;
• IDA, for all its critics, has been effective; its low-income members need debt relief today and they are not getting it from the Common Framework (https://www.imf.org/en/About/FAQ/sovereign-debt) which is today no more than a tool for self-promotion of the Davosawi;
• The potential losses from a new pandemic are enormous, as were those from COVID (https://www.worldbank.org/en/publication/wdr2022/brief/chapter-1-introduction-the-economic-impacts-of-the-covid-19-crisis); the spending proposed here on global health of US$106 billion is small compared to the potential returns; and
• The Foundation’s administration costs can be reduced, saving somewhere around US$0.5 billion annually.
The one great obstacle
The obstacle is of course Gates himself. While the first two areas of focus—Washington state services and IDA debt relief—can be funded from current Foundation holdings, using the balance of some US$106 billion that is now held in his personal fortune will be more complicated. The financial and legal engineering needed to deploy that balance could be done before the end of 2025 but depends on a binding commitment from Gates to make gifts in a package that cannot be untied. He ought to hold himself to his now notorious promise in a gift structure that does not bind his generosity with expensive legal and operational fetters that do nothing but give more money to the lawyers and to the hangers-on at Davos.
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[1]. Gates and Microsoft, whose stock forms much of the Foundation's assets today, have also benefited from publicly funded research and development in the US.
[2]. This transfer must not operate the way HIPC/MDRI did or like the present Common Framework [https://www.imf.org/en/About/FAQ/sovereign-debt]. The short explanation is that those earlier debt relief initiatives were deliberately delayed by the IMF, the World Bank and certain bilaterals, notably France, for political reasons.