Gates has caught lawmakers' attention. | John Shinkle/POLITICO Bill Gates, time traveler

There’s a bit of the time traveler about Bill Gates — or function meets dysfunction.

It’s as if the Microsoft billionaire, so identified with the modern computer age, has unfinished business with the 20th century and is inviting Congress to come along on a journey to go back and pull forward those left behind.


This week found Gates in the Capitol promoting his plan to combine a 1960s-era oral vaccine with new satellite photography and GPS trackers to eradicate polio finally from the globe. Picking up where the Green Revolution left off in his youth, the 57-year-old Gates talked up new farming methods and genetically modified seeds as an answer for hunger in Africa, whose staple crops were neglected in earlier research.

( PHOTOS: Bill Gates)

“It’s all about innovation,” Gates told POLITICO. “Now that I am focused on the poorest, in some ways, you could say the innovation is more basic.”

What’s basic, too, is Gates’s genuine influence.

This is more about brains and billions than conventional political muscle. But veterans of Gates’s charitable foundation now occupy top posts in President Barack Obama’s administration: Sylvia Mathews Burwell, the new White House budget director, and Rajiv Shah, administrator of the United States Agency for International Development. And much as Gates says he doesn’t lobby Congress per se, he enjoys a level of access that’s the envy of many and freely offers “technical advice” on issues before lawmakers.

“It’s a straight answer, but it is an indirect answer,” he told a reporter — without batting an eye.

( PHOTOS: POLITICO Playbook Cocktails with Bill Gates)

Jetting in to Washington on Monday, Gates appeared with former President Bill Clinton at a public forum Tuesday morning and then went behind closed doors to speak to the Senate Republican luncheon. Throughout the day, there were face-to-face meetings with senior members of the Senate and House Appropriations committees important to Gates’s health and agriculture agendas. And before flying out Wednesday, his schedule included time with Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, a rising young Republican star whose support could prove pivotal.

“He’s a character,” said Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio). “Not your typical corporate CEO who comes in pounding the table.”

It’s this side of Gates, the practical, unconventional Harvard dropout, that’s most appealing for lawmakers caught in their own dysfunction.

“I wish there were more like him around here,” said Sen. Dan Coats (R-Ind.). “He’s very results-oriented.”

“He is trying to get programs over the finish line that have stalled out,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.). “He is a guy with a real sense of detail. A great combination of a visionary who understands detail, and he is interesting to listen to because he can make a complicated issue understandable.”

In these tough budget times, Gates knows, too, he is sailing against the wind, asking Washington to increase its annual commitment to an international polio fund from $100 million to $150 million. That’s a 50 percent increase — post the March sequester.

Then again, he is putting in twice that of his own money: $300 million a year for a total of $1.8 billion through 2018. And this week’s Washington visit followed on a global vaccine conference in Abu Dhabi in April where he won billions in pledges from other nations.

Nigeria, Pakistan and Afghanistan — all poor, all subject to internal strife — are the three major targets. But the payoff could be huge if polio is wiped out, eliminating the need for costly vaccinations in the future.

“Polio just happens to be in a very acute period of proving to the world that we can raise the money, so people don’t see that as the thing that will block polio,” Gates said. “We’re putting our credibility on the line and our $1.8 billion, pulling this together. I spent a lot of the last year making sure the plan was a good plan.”

Next up is malaria, where continued U.S. contributions to the Geneva-based Global Fund, and Gates’s foundation has established itself as a world leader in developing the next vaccines — and a “real super thermos” to keep them cold for up to 90 days.

Indeed, the thermos project captures the sort of basic problem-solving he speaks of: how to keep vaccines viable while reaching out to poor villages where no refrigeration is available. In the same way, the satellite photos and GPS trackers — introduced in the polio program — allow Gates to direct vaccine teams to specific locations but also make sure the workers do so.

“We are using satellite photography to find all the villages. We’re putting GPS trackers in the so-called vaccine box,” he said. “Every three minutes, it looks at where the person is, and we plug that in when they come back to see if they went exactly where they were supposed to go. … It’s a black box, so if they miss anything, we go back and fix that.”

Gates’s increased role in world agriculture stems, in part, from his early work in promoting enriched crops as a way to improve health and battle disease with more Vitamin A and iron, for example.

“Our micro-nutrient work, which is called HarvestPlus — where you add nutrients to crops — that started in our health group,” he explained. “That got us involved in sweet potatoes, bananas, golden rice and a couple of others. Then we realized scientifically we can create these things, but will the farmers adopt them?”

Indeed, Gates’s support of genetically modified seeds and his alliances with some U.S. agribusiness giants is not without criticism. The notion of a Microsoft veteran teamed up with Monsanto can turn some greens blue.

This is seen most in Africa, where Europe is still an important force and home to many opponents of GMOs — genetically modified organisms — as such seeds are commonly known.

“There are GMO skeptics more in Europe maybe than in other places but not exclusively,” Gates said. “The Europeans donate money to [African farmers], give them advice, and they’re listening to that. … It’s more [Europe’s] influence to say, ‘Watch out. These things are bad.’”

At the same time, Africa has been a priority for Gates, who argues that many of the biggest staples grown on the continent — like cassava, sorghum and legumes — were “neglected” by the Green Revolution, which focused more on improving the production of rice, wheat and maize elsewhere in the world.

“The Green Revolution focused on the big three — maize, rice and wheat — and the Green Revolution did not adapt the big three to African conditions, other than South Africa, as much as they should have,” Gates said. “We tilt toward Africa because we do a lot of so-called neglected crops.”

Increasingly, this effort has focused, too, on promoting livestock, including chickens, dairy and beef cattle as a way to improve nutrition.

The combination of Gates’s Africa commitment and not backing down to Europe on the GMO front is appealing to Republicans in Congress whose support he wants on other issues — like polio funding.

Senators coming out of Tuesday’s lunch said Gates had cited a January speech by the British environmental activist and writer Mark Lynas as a sign that the tide might be changing.

Addressing the Oxford Farming Conference, Lynas made headlines by apologizing upfront for “having spent several years ripping up” genetically modified crops. He went on to praise a recent Gates-backed GMO project and lament the fears instilled in African nations at the expense of better nutrition for their people. “He had been one of the big GMO opponents for 15 years and just said, ‘I’m wrong,’” said Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.).

More ticklish politically is the question of revamping U.S. food aid programs overseas.

With USAID’s Shah in the lead, the Obama administration is proposing a much greater reliance on cash purchases rather than the traditional shipment of American-grown commodities under the Food for Peace program. This rankles farm-state Republicans, and Gates is careful in how he chooses his words despite his obvious sympathies with the case made by Shah in testimony before Congress.

“We’re not commenting on the specific law, but the cash-based approach, based on experience, would be more effective in terms of both the number of people you can feed per dollar but also in the targeting,” Gates said. “You get the money there early where young children need to maintain the nutrition, and then you can be smarter about when it is not needed anymore so you are not distorting local farm prices.”

“So are you for it?” he was asked.

Gates begged off. “We are not a lobbying organization,” he said and then smiled. “But if you listen to our technical advice, you get a very positive feeling about this type of activity.”