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What you need to know this week: Gates Foundation to recommit billions for Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance; conservative leaders oppose charity tax increase; charitable giving was up in 2024; and more.

—Tamara Straus, senior editor

Chronicle Illustration; Photos via U.S. Senate, U.S. DHS

• Funds terminated: In March, the New York Times reported that the Trump administration planned to cancel all U.S. government funds for Gavi — the public-private partnership that provides life-saving vaccines for children in developing countries. Since then, the question of private aid has been on many lips. Gavi says it has prevented 18.8 million deaths since 2000.
• Gates to the rescue: On Tuesday, the Gates Foundation announced a $1.6 billion recommitment over five years to support Gavi, Reuters reported. “For the first time in decades, the number of kids dying around the world will likely go up this year instead of down because of massive cuts to foreign aid. That is a tragedy,” warned Bill Gates. “Fully funding Gavi is the single most powerful step we can take to stop it.” The Gates Foundation has announced plans to shutter in 2045, spending down $200 billion over the next 20 years.
• RFK Jr. weighs in: On Wednesday, U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said in a video posted by the New York Times that the U.S. government won’t support Gavi until the global-health organization has “re-earned the public trust” by “consider[ing] the best science available, even when the science contradicts established paradigms.”

• ‘Catastrophic impact’: Philanthropy Roundtable, a nonprofit that advises conservative philanthropists, along with representatives from 28 free-market and conservative organizations, sent a coalition letter Monday to the U.S. House of Representatives opposing the tax increases on private foundations in its version of the “Big Beautiful Bill.” The letter warns: “The House-passed bill would raise taxes on charities by more than 600 percent, allowing the IRS to take nearly $16 billion from private charitable foundations that would otherwise help improve the lives of many Americans.”
• ‘Antithetical to conservative values’: The group argues that “as nonprofit organizations that support individual liberty, limited government, and free enterprise, we know policies that siphon private dollars away from charities to line the government’s coffers are antithetical to conservative values and significantly impair the ability to pursue our missions.”
• Senate version: Philanthropy Roundtable did not comment on the Senate version of the tax bill, which does not include the proposed increases in excise taxes on net investment income at private foundations, the Chronicle of Philanthropy reported last week.

• Probe without documentation: The House Judiciary Committee opened an inquiry into an immigration nonprofit’s alleged ties to anti-ICE protests in Los Angeles, according to the New York Post. The committee argues that the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights (CHIRLA) “may be using federal funds to support violent criminal activity that impedes the enforcement of federal immigration law.” The House Judiciary Committee documentation of the investigation is a reprint of the Post article. CHIRLA received roughly $450,000 in Department of Homeland Security grants for citizenship education and training from 2021 to 2024; $101,000 that was to be paid out has been terminated.
• NSF funding: A federal judge has blocked the Trump administration from cutting tens of millions of dollars in research funding provided by the National Science Foundation, the Associated Press reports. U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani in Boston said the cuts were arbitrary, capricious, and contrary to law. The universities argued the move threatened critical work in artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, semiconductors, and other technology fields.
• Harvard negotiating: Behind closed doors, Harvard officials may be hammering out a truce with President Trump to stop the administration from stripping billions of dollars in research funding and barring the institution from enrolling international students, the New York Times reports. “Lawrence H. Summers, a former Harvard president who has been critical of the university’s culture, suggested in an interview on Monday that a deal, in and of itself, should not be seen as a surrender,” the Times wrote.

• Modest but measurable: Nonprofits received $592.5 billion in donations in 2024, a 3.3 percent increase over 2023 after adjusting for inflation, according to “Giving USA,” reports the Chronicle of Philanthropy’s Rasheeda Childress.
• The details: The biggest jumps were in giving to public society benefit organizations, 16.1 percent; international affairs, 14.3 percent; and education, 9.9 percent. Only one major cause — religion — saw an inflation-adjusted decline in giving (down 1 percent).
• Little celebration: The increase may be small comfort to nonprofits that in 2025 experienced a significant drop in federal funding, more than 20,000 layoffs, increased demand for services, and market uncertainty that has led some donors to pull back. “There’s a lot of uncertainty, a lot of volatility, especially in financial markets,” said Una Osili, an associate dean at the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy. “When you’re not sure exactly what’s happening and the news is changing, that sometimes leads to donors just being uncertain and not acting. Uncertainty can dampen giving.”

“The resentment that rural people feel has come to a boiling point, and it’s become very dangerous. It has had very disastrous effects on our political life and on our government. When people feel so abandoned, they’re ready to just vote for the guy who says, ‘I’m going to blow up the system,’ which is a really dangerous thing to do.”

– Author Barbara Kingsolver on the urban-rural divide in The Commons in Conversation

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