policy. also read wilson will join us to talk about his book on the 2014 if all epidemic and international response. be sure to watch "washington journal" live at 7:00 a.m. eastern. join the discussion. >> tuesday a look at possible. talks at an event hosted by the institute for korean-american studies. bill gates sat down with politico for a wide ranging interview ahead of his meeting with president trump. mr. gates said he would impress upon the president how tornado and taxpayer dollars combined with foundations like the bill and melinda gates foundation to help save lives. this is 45 minutes.

[applause] >> thanks, so much. mr. gates: thank you. >> thank you so much for being here today. we are excited to kick off the conversation. why don't we just take a step back about what you're doing here, what your message is. >> why are you here? [laughter] >> what is the message you are bringing to washington on this trip. mr. gates: my full-time work at the gates foundation, we have two big things we focus on. one is u.s. education. the other is global health. the u.s. government is a key partner in both of those activities. in the case of health work for all the diseases, the nih is either the biggest funder or the second-biggest funder. making sure that research helps us understand how to work together better. and in terms of foreign aid, the overall foreign aid, the u.s. is the biggest single country.

as a percentage of the economy, at about $30 billion of that. as a percentage of the economy, it's lower than some others. some above 2% like norway and sweden. summit .7 like germany and the u.k. -- and some at .7 like germany and the u.k. but it is a huge pool of resources. we need to partner up with all the donors to go after things like polio eradication. the program on hiv is absolutely miraculous in terms of holding that disease in check for us to get a vaccine. a lot of the discussion is about the money allocated to these things or with the executive branch on the -- branch on the execution of these things.

i am back here for sam's ear. -- four times a year. >> when the white house daily guidance came out last night, we learned that you are visiting the president today. talk about your experience with the president and what your message is going into the white house. message is going into the white house. mr. gates: this is a fairly interesting time. [applause] [laughter] gates budget wise, it is : interesting, because since there was a demand to get the defense budget up and they other mr. defense not being too far behind, overall, it will be making a 12% increase assuming the omnibus passes without some big change. and that is pretty unusual. >> more spending than almost any

time in the last decade. mr. gates: and more likely than to be in future decades. in the discussion about of that 12% increase, what are the problems? this is a serious amount of money. $143 billion dollars in year is 30 times greater than what the foundation gets. so the idea, where should that go? a strange unit of measure. as a transport, is it education, and hearing how people are thinking about that, where does the decision to break down, where does that get me? the best ideas from various political groups.

the good news for the area, the greatest concern for us, the foreign aid budget means that for two years here, the normal discussion about where does this really go, and isn't this some of this not spent perfectly? can someone else just do this for us? that challenge would be far less. often when i come here is because i get to go and see new work. i can come back and say we are measuring this, here is how we improve it. there is a huge benefit to the u.s. in terms of having a stable africa. talking about the measurement way that we make sure the money that we are spending together on the u.s. government, we make sure that is spent as best as can be. >> you alluded to this. in one week, the budget needs to be passed of the government will

shut down. which we do not anticipate. if you could wave a wand and get one or two things done or get congress to do one or two things, what would it be? mr. gates: it is important to remember you cannot wave a wand. it allocates money and makes policies. the private sector and science to liver most of the miracles. -- science deliver most of the toacles, yet those to need go together. the internet was funded by darpa which is part of the defense budget. most of the great biological advances that have been made our because the u.s. taxpayer is so generous with the nih and if you compare globally, way over half the money is discovering how to cure cancer, spent here in the united states.

and it is win-win. people go and build the products and the real benefits, and immensely, from that. if i had a wand, i would mostly waive it to create magic and clean energy source. taking the work on malnutrition and it is a great problem. let's understand and get rid of malnutrition. congress is super important. the miracles require the hands-on private sector piece as well. >> when you think about your meeting with the president, what is the best case scenario coming out of it. mr. gates: two clear messages. one is about foreign aid. we are partnered with the

government. to help articulate why even if you just look at the benefit to america, stability and disease being the most likely to come here, this is very beneficial. having those relationships, maintaining that commitment, continuing to tune it. these are things coming out of that. that has been my primary message. because of this budget increase, the second message would be that there is an opportunity to take on some tough unsolved problems. i would highlight the preparedness we have for the pandemic, a bioterrorism intention called pandemic, we don't have the tools, the preparedness, the capacity to deal with that. and the science is at a point

for a very small portion of that increase, say, if you percent a year. you can do something quite barak miraculous in terms of health security. there is a specific way that this one is a little complicated. there is the civilian side and the defense side that needs to work together to achieve that. to see if you can get excited about that as something to prioritize. with the new spending. >> the president has said, has tweeted and said in other settings that foreign aid is the cause of our budget deficit and the country spends way too much on helping other countries. it is time to start helping our country. it is a message the president has said multiple times. how do you get a president that is allergic, it seems, to some of these ideas.

mr. gates: foreign aid is so obscure and people bring it up even in a negative sense, at least they are bringing it up. and then have a chance to explain to people that it is less than 1% the u.s. budget. and when you hear that word, you don't connect with saving lives with hiv medicine. you add the malaria piece to it. a very big part of the 30 billion is that specific disease work. you explain that to them. should we continue to save those lives, we can see if that gets out of control.

and until we get a vaccine that will enable us to and the hiv epidemic. people respond very positively. if people could go on trips with man see these things -- >> you could invite them. mr. gates: a lot more voters than seats my plane. and absolutely getting members of congress to go see this work. people like lindsey graham are very active at encouraging his colleagues to go out and see. i think that is why many elements of foreign aid continue to have this very strong response. it did not stop a budget proposal from having potential cuts. the congress did not consider

seriously cutting that money. they did not have the commitment to it. >> are you concerned about the america first rhetoric? it's what your whole mission in the world is these days. mr. gates: i don't agree with the american first rhetoric. i think the alliances we built over time and the help we provide the countries, lifting them, starting with the marshall plan, in supporting the united nations and the bilateral things we do, we have made the world a more stable place. and i think that's a good just from a pure humanitarian point of view. i think foreign-made, because -- i do think that foreign aid because the budget is so small, , we pick things that are so effective that even if it benefits americans, and don't want to have to send soldiers off to create stability in africa. and we spend over 600 billion a

year on defense and 30 billion a year on the foreign aid budget. that is a 20 to one ratio. for european countries, the ratio is actually pretty close. or three to one. we are very much a hard power country. president bush thinking he will exercise that power and they make sure that soft power piece was made stronger as well. that is why he picked pepfar. if you cut it, you have to give him more money for weapons. i'm a huge believer that that framework does not say that we should cut the money. >> when donald trump ran for the

presidency, he talked about being a businessman. and that is why he was elected. in your experience running businesses, do you feel like there's a good sense of how he's -- how he thinks? and has everybody you met in your time and your career prepared you to deal with somebody like him? [laughter] mr. gates: in business, you meet a lot of different kinds of people. and you have to be good at adapting to different styles of working. i wasn't in the new york real estate business or the new jersey casino business. it is a whole different approach, but you know, you find things in common. and i think president trump would like to take some of this

new money and have something that's new and makes a big difference that he is personally exercising leadership against that. everyone should be creative about what can be taken to him that would fit that and serve the country's interest, and really resonate. that is something that presidential leadership would be important to make it happen. >> one of the questions, we want to take a step back. take a step back. walk us through a day in the life of bill gates. mr. gates: well, the foundation shapes most of my time.

i still spend about 10% of my time over at microsoft, a board meeting on monday and tuesday. i get to help shape some of the strategies. i do some things outside of the foundation in terms of the science. a ton of work on clean energy. a bunch of energy related things. the lives of dollars that people pull together. to finance breakthroughs in clean energy. most of my time is at the foundation. you do malaria, hiv, tb. it happens a lot. we do the u.s.

the two components there. i travel a lot. i need to go to africa through four times year. next week i will be in chad and , nigeria the entire week. i spend a lot of time and nigeria because it is a quarter of the population in sub-saharan africa. it is a challenge to country in terms of the governments, and i will be over there. i love -- a lot of the other trips are to the other donor countries, the u.k. in germany give more than half the u.s. does because even though the population economy is dramatically smaller, we are talking to them about joint work. polio eradication is the single

biggest project, in a very critical phase or we got three countries, nigeria, afghanistan, and pakistan. had liveries that have poliovirus in the past three years. and so, if we execute well, this will be the last year the child gets paralyzed with polio ever. [applause] >> we asked some of our readers to send us questions. that they would like to ask you. we won't give you all of them. one that was very interesting is, how do you decide what areas to fund? this is from a reader who said malaria, tb, and polio are three things you have worked to eradicate. there are other diseases such as

viral hepatitis. i am not as familiar with some of these diseases that you might be. how do you take us through your thought process? mr. gates: we pick the two areas we are going to work in, just based on our values. no one can work on all the areas. so u.s. education and global health. once we pick global health, then within that, we are extremely rational about saying, ok, of this money, what can have the health. once we pick global health, then highest impact. and we can save a life for less than $1000 a life saved. it sets a bar. if someone comes in and says we should work on cancer because you can do something.

the pharmaceutical companies with the r&d budget 20 times bigger than ours, they are working hard on that. the incremental benefit of any new advance there is the -- is more in the $400,000 per life saved regime. going out and getting more meaningful vaccines is more $1000 per life saved. working on infectious diseases, things like very cheap drugs and where vaccines can be invented and gotten out to people. our biggest metric, when i got started, over 10 million children under the age of five died per year. that number has been cut in ha. that is because of what we and our partners have done with vaccines and improving the primary health care system. and by 2030, we will cut that in half again.

it will go from $5 million a year to $2.5 million a year. so huge progress in a dramatic way. the diseases that are very rare, we have made so much progress on the big ones that we just funded to go look at heart disease and high blood pressure. we're talking sickle cell. not a focus for us. it might be if we figure out the right treatment or new inventions. it is 2% of the death and nigeria it is specifically due to sickle cell.

in the interest of washington, the understanding of what people buy from, 100 times better today than when we got started. we don't have to do things that are hard. no autopsies are done for these children. we created a thing called a minimally invasive autopsy were we can take a few samples and have it analyzed. and labs we have created in africa to get a picture of what we need to do to save these lives. >> we should kick it out one of our reporters. >> thank you for being here today. >> one of the reasons the trump

administration gives in wanting to cut foreign aid budget is they feel like other countries are not doing their fair share. they say the u.s. pays more than it should end it is making other countries dependent on us. some countries have smaller populations and give a significant amount. is this argument an original one? as leslie kind of shock for countries to step up, give more and be less dependent on usaid? mr. gates: the figure of merit is what percent of gdp do you give as foreign aid? norway is 1.1%, sweden is 1%, the u.k. is .7%. germany is .7%. we are .22%. we are substantially less generous than those countries

are. it is true that if you withdraw, pepfar, not getting hiv drugs is a form of shock. those people will not need foreign aid because they will be dead. i don't totally get the logic, and realize it would be a smart thing to do. you allow countries to lift themselves up so that they become self-sufficient. when the u.s. started giving aid after world war ii, a lot of that went to redevelop europe, some to develop japan. by the time you get to the 1960's, you have a very much a bifurcated world you have rich countries and poor countries and almost nothing in the middle.

and partly because of science and economic development, a miracle took place which was that today, most people live in middle income countries. and they are not aid recipients. brazil, mexico, and fairly soon india, china. the book of the 7 billion people live in those middle income countries that are not substantial sources of aid and -- or substantial recipients of aid. and the low income countries and those countries in order to get stability, help, education, so they can have their own domestic tax collection. they need foreign aid. when you have malaria, and hiv epidemic. there is no source of revenue that will help you by the hiv medicines. or the malaria budd nats.

-- bug nets. and in particular, research for the malaria vaccine. who should do that? the resources and the expertise are not in those four countries. -- those poor countries. we became the biggest malaria vaccine funder. and so the market is not going to provide it. and in terms of humanity, it is still killing. we've made a lot of progress but it still kills 500,000 kids a year. if i told you there are kids dying in this audience could save those two kids, i think people would respond. net.sts $28 per bed and help those two kids, but those two kids would be dependent on us. they wouldn't die of malaria, they would be dependent on us. it is hard for me to understand the notion that helping people

poorer than we are is a bad thing. it's kind of in the bible. [laughter] >> in terms of finding partners, i wanted to ask you a question. you were butting heads with the government. and now so much of your time is spent moving leaders trying to get countries. -- countries to give more money, doing this diplomacy effort. have you had to reshape your framework of where government should be involved? mr. gates: government is a necessary thing. justice, military. and it is true that microsoft had this long doj lawsuit. always driving by the district court where i would go onto the

sidewalk and say that was a good day in court. even when it wasn't, sometimes. >> these days you probably don't miss those days. mr. gates: the doj loss was not the most positive thing, but i loved my time at microsoft. and it is true, people treat government, they treat me nicer as a philanthropist then as a capitalist. but that's understandable. >> you have to be a capitalist before you become a philanthropist. mr. gates: it helps. or you will not be a particularly large philanthropist. that affects the impact. you can say it's a tiny bit ironic. and we started the foundation, i thought the primary world would be the invention of the new tools. that is a little over half of what we do. the hiv vaccine, the tb vaccine.

all those things. the idea that we would have to get involved in the delivery to and improve the primary health care system and partner with the government of ethiopia to look at where you put your health clinics, how do you train those people and measure their work? which part of this should be -- [indiscernible] i did not know that this was going to be necessary. i thought the right things were invented and other people would make sure they got out there. but it turned out that it wasn't realistic. there were some fairly good tools that hadn't been invented. realistic. there was a vaccine for a cause iarrhea, rotavirus -- it was being given to exactly the kids that didn't need it. rich kids never die of rotavirus. poor kids were dying of rotavirus.

over 500,000 a year. and those poor kids were not getting the vaccine. if you make the right guarantees, it's about three dollars for a full dose of that vaccine. that's one of our great achievements. now, virtually every child in the world is getting the rotavirus vaccine. that is an element from how he million a from 10 year dying to 5 million a year. >> it has been very effective in -- it has been 15 years since been very effective in your view and in many people's view. since it passed congress and a very bipartisan way. i wonder now, when you encounter when you try to build new allies on capitol hill. you want to shake shack and took a selfie. and had some hamburgers. >> the shake shack summit. >> tell us what you encounter in cash and do you sense resistance? how do you pick your allies? >> the next generation, if you

will. >> lindsey graham and john mccain are champions of some of these causes, but they are veteran lawmakers. how do you go about finding these folks and convincing them foreign aid and global health are important priorities? mr. gates: our team led by rob neighbors, reaching out. his foreign aid something you like to learn about. and even people that come in with a fairly negative attitude, the more you learn about this, the more you realize, wow, this is real. this is pretty important stuff. whenever melinda and i come, a fair portion of the time is sitting down and talking about the progress and hearing what concerns they might have.

we probably more focus on people on state and foreign ops. committees, but we don't limit ourselves to that because these simple ideas about foreign aid, we want to rebut those. even the press coverage of foreign aid, oxfam had a scandal which is awful. the good news doesn't travel quite as fast as the bad news. trying to make sure people have an overall picture, some things are not managed that well. but overall, whether it is health, education, agriculture, sanitation. this time has been the best ever in helping poor countries. uplift themselves. >> we have a question from a reporter in the audience. >> facebook, twitter, and google have faced harsh criticism for what is seen as allowing their platforms for getting out of control.

one symptom of which is russia's efforts to influence american domestic policy -- politics. you have had some experience with government oversight. do you think the government needs to step in? if not, why not? if so, what would it look like? mr. gates: the interest in do these platforms polarize people in a way that exacerbates polarization that is already taking place and do they allow for an -- foreign influence that shouldn't be allowed for roles and hate speech to come on and affect people's views. those are super interesting questions in a democracy. in the world of media, there have always been government rules about how media is used politically.

and yet, even if people have a desire to say that these platforms need to do something take facebook's and particular, the specific tak recommendations about what they should do i find fairly vague. the idea of, is there an exact line where free speech stops and hate speech starts? and what is it that foreigners are allowed to say. foreigners can go on to these forums and talk. you will probably not have u.s. citizens talking to each other and when does it become a form of political influence? what type of visibility shouldn't have? -- should it have? there were draft bills that would've created huge transparency of who is buying ads on these platforms if they did not choose to move those particular bills forward.

there is something that needs to be looked at. the actual solutions are a little less clear. >> what do you hear from foreign leaders which you obviously me all the time about the united states at this moment? mr. gates: the way the world has benefited from u.s. leadership is hard to overstate. most of their policies, they say what did the u.s. do? how did the u.s. get great universities? how did the u.s. organize research? even on an issue like what do we do to prepare for a pandemic? the cdc is by far the best in the world at what they do. it is phenomenal. the u.n. system has benefited not only from resources but the personnel that go there.

people from cdc are working at world health organization's, really professionalizing it. there is an expectation that the u.s. cares about world stability and world progress. if we surprised people and start to pull back from those things or we say our role in those short-term have a focus on our sole benefit in those activities as opposed to long-term benefit for all of the different members, that is potentially a problem. it creates a vacuum of leadership. that people badly miss. if you poll them about the you statesou love the united

they say no, there is a dominant , country that doesn't do everything well. it picks things to get involved in that they shouldn't and they don't get involved in things that they should. everyone has an opinion about how the world's leader goes about exercising leadership. as an engagement has gone down, in a lot of these forms, -- four forums, i think people are very much missing it. >> there is new leadership at the state department with mike pompeo coming in as head of the agency. do you work with him? will we have a stable way for -- diplomat for this country? mr. gates: we always work with the secretary of state. we have mark green, the administrator over at usaid. the pepfar money, there is an coordinator, but a lot of

that money is coming out to usaid. and there is a deep collaboration there. if the hiring of good people and morale at the state department can be improved under new leadership, that will be a good thing. i will certainly going meet the new secretary and talk about the partnerships we've had, and how we can manage those. >> something we haven't talked about is a new interest, new priority. which is alzheimer's. a lot of your work is a broad, so it doesn't touch the u.s. as much as it does and perhaps sub-saharan africa. but talk about what you're doing on alzheimer's and how you can have a big impact. mr. gates: a big part is our work and education. which is a complicated but a

super important area. alzheimer's is unusual because super important area. alzheimer's is unusual because there is a gigantic market. who ever created drug pictures -- that cures alzheimer's will make billions of dollars. and yet, it is the target that proves to be very difficult. these are very expensive because the gold standard is improving behavior on a cognition test. in some cases, it takes 60 -- six to eight years. prior -- this is a disease where getting the drug up to a place in the brain across the blood brain barrier, that is very difficult. the human cost and economic cost of dementia, and alzheimer's and particular is gigantic. a lot of that liability for

long-term care will fall on the government. you could say even though we are very generous compared to any other country, our investment in solving this problem at a research level hasn't done enough. the congress with a few people being very active is taking the budget from five years ago, that from 400t, has gone million and under the proposed budget is likely to get all the way up to about 2 billion. that is as fast as growth as the national cancer institute the beginning of the war on cancer. so it is a fantastic thing. my role in saying that this is a disease that requires a lot of different actors to come in my , role is on funding people for a biomarker. getting the data organized. there's a lot of international

data, pharma data, u.s. government data. they can learn about disease progression. and that is something we done in the foundation. with lots of how a lot of young children grow and when they fall through. doing that type of database, it goes back to my microsoft background. how you empower researchers. there is a few things, including investing in early-stage and high risk companies that have no approaches. plaques,clear the those are the drug trials that so far have not worked out. >> i do want to ask about education because that is a big focus of yours. secretary betsy devos has made a lot of changes not in line with where your priorities are. foyer foundation. what is your reaction to that?

how concerned are you? >> did you watch her on 60 minutes? mr. gates: no, i read articles about it. the truth is, the federal government under the obama administration and bush government under the obama administration and bush administration was active in trying to say, how do we manage teachers?

are we looking at how they achieve things, are we getting feedback to them? idea of school choice, there is quite a bit that we agree with that having newng charters to try out things, that can be very positive. where never going to have i do not think more than 10% that -- of kids in charter. in if you do the best job possible you have to use that as a learning lab for the 90% who are not going to be in charters. so we are in a lot of [indiscernible] partnering, try to find out new things. i thought global health would be the hard thing that we would make very little progress in because it is so tough create we

have quick wins in u.s. education, maybe move the maps up i 5%, moved the reading scores up 10%, really get that to build their confidence so we can go out there to nigeria on a regular basis area day has been the opposite. that is not to say our u.s. education stuff every school , where we've gotten involved whether it is public school or charter, great things have happened. but when it comes to taking that and scaling it up, getting other schools to adopt it or even the school that we are in, say it is three years after we've been there, does it persist or does that mentoring program or teacher collaboration program go away? so we feel good about the direct intervention, but as a philanthropy in k-12, it is $600 billion a year being spent in that market. what you're doing is the r&d pilot program type thing.

if you want to move the macro statistic, you have to figure out not only good ideas that work, but good ideas that get massive adoption. and there the field including ourselves does not have this huge success. the one thing we did that the best as we got people really talking about the dropout rate in an honest way. up until then, people talked about the entering senior last. -- class. and most of the dropout takes place over those three years. people have paid attention to that and that dropout number has gone down some. but it is nothing like what we have achieved in global health. >> we are just about out of time and it is a fascinating conversation. you do expect you can move president trump off of his america first rhetoric?

mr. gates: i will take his framework and explain why things like health security and continued foreign aid, even in that narrow framework where you give no credit for saving lives in africa, kind of a church -- a pure humanitarian thing -- even without that, this is money well spent. >> tell him we say hello. >> thank you for the great conversation. [applause] you gallup.ank our host for being so generous. thank you for tuning in. have a great day. [applause] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org]

[captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2018] policy every day with issues that impact you. tuesday morning, washington post technology reporter tony rahm and politico technology reporter discuss data privacy in the analytical cambridge fallout. and an international response. be sure to watch c-span's washington journal live at seven eastern tuesday morning. join the discussion. up, this week's landmark cases looking at the 1963 case of gideon v wainwright. in 19 64, cbs reports looked at the landmark supreme court case which guarantees the right to counsel for criminal defendants. it included interviews with clarence