In 2020, Jeff Bezos established the Bezos Earth Fund with a pledge to dole out $10 billion in grants by the end of the decade. One of the organization’s core investments is environmental justice. It has committed hundreds of millions of dollars to support Justice40, a Biden-era initiative that earmarked 40 percent of federal environmental investments to disadvantaged communities. In January, however, the federal initiative was revoked by an executive order from President Donald Trump. Since then, a page on the Bezos Earth Fund’s website highlighting the Justice40 initiative as one of the fund’s “big ideas” has been taken down.
Archived pages show that the Bezos Earth Fund had pledged $200 million to help communities access Justice40 funds as of last September, with grantees including the NDN Collective, an Indigenous-led advocacy organization, and Emerald Cities Collaborative, a nonprofit focused on climate justice. The Bezos Earth Fund has helped various community-led projects secure $43 million worth of federal and state funding since 2021, according to a January 2024 post from the organization. The Bezos Earth Fund declined requests for comment regarding the initiative.
Despite Trump slashing numerous federal environmental justice programs, the Bezos Earth Fund says it will continue to support investments in the area. In 2023, for example, it launched its Greening America’s Cities Initiative, giving $50 million to an initial cohort of organizations and promising to award a total of $400 million to community environmental justice groups through 2030 via annual grants.
“While the Bezos Earth Fund did not issue new grants in 2024, we remain fully committed to advancing this important work to enhance green spaces in underserved urban communities, and we expect to make more grants in this current year,” said the fund in a statement to Observer, noting that it “remains deeply committed to our mission in the years ahead.”
One grantee the fund is no longer supporting is the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi), an international body that sets greenhouse gas emission reduction targets for corporations. The relationship between SBTi and the Bezos Earth Fund—which formerly gave the initiative $18 million—ended in December in part due to Bezos not wanting to upset Trump, according to the Financial Times, which cited people familiar with the funding. Like several Big Tech leaders, Bezos, in recent months, has become increasingly cozy with the President, who withdrew the U.S. from the Paris Agreement earlier this year and has cast doubt on the validity of climate change.
The Bezos Earth Fund, however, claims its three-year grant to SBTi was always supposed to end in 2024 and that the climate body hasn’t requested additional funds. “As a result, the Earth Fund has made no decision with regard to further funding,” the organization said in a statement.
Shake-ups have additionally occurred across the fund’s leadership, with CEO Andrew Steer announcing plans to step down earlier this month. “I feel this is a good time for another change,” said Steer in a recent LinkedIn post, in which he described working with Bezos and Lauren Sánchez, Bezos’ fiancée and the fund’s vice chair, as “stimulating and enjoyable.” Steer will leave the organization on Feb. 21, with the fund’s general counsel, Doug Varley, stepping in as interim CEO.
How are other foundations reacting to Trump’s policies?
The Bezos Earth Fund isn’t the only billionaire-led charity facing newfound questions in recent weeks. Staffers at the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), a charity founded by Meta (META)’s Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan, have reportedly raised concerns over how Zuckerberg’s ties to Trump could impact the organization. While Meta recently followed the Trump administration’s lead by cutting diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) efforts, CZI employees have been reassured that no such changes will be taking place at the charity, as reported by the Guardian.
Unlike his Big Tech peers, Microsoft (MSFT) founder Bill Gates—who has doled out $60 billion worth of his fortune to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation—has taken a more defensive stance on Trump’s agenda. Gates recently met with the President to advocate against cutting HIV funding and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), a humanitarian aid agency that Trump is looking to shut down. “Getting those people out there in their depth of experience, that’s an asset that would be very hard to recreate,” Gates told NBC’s TODAY show of the agency, adding that his foundation gives “billions of dollars to the same thing that USAID does.”
