November 1, 2001 | Read Time: 6 minutes
David Lane doesn’t want to be called the lobbyist for the Bill & Melinda Gates
Foundation, but as the director of the fund’s newly established East Coast office in Washington, he certainly has the connections to be one.
Mr. Lane, 41, has served as the head of the White House’s National Economic Council, which he helped create during the early days of the Clinton administration, and was chief of staff at the Commerce Department in 1996, where he spearheaded efforts to get Congress to approve legislation to improve trade relations with China.
However, Mr. Lane’s job isn’t to influence Washington politicians, but to help build partnerships in the areas the $24-billion Gates Foundation supports — global health and education.
He’s not a fund raiser or grant maker but a facilitator, he says. His job is to bring together potential collaborators and gather information to help the foundation staff members in Seattle make grants.
For example, Mr. Lane plans to meet with visiting officials from other countries to discuss the foundation’s disease-prevention efforts and with governors to talk about the foundation’s examination of the effects of small class sizes on high-school students.
His office, which officially opened October 15, includes only a receptionist for now, but Mr. Lane plans to recruit four other staff members by March.
In a recent interview, Mr. Lane talked to The Chronicle about his new position and the new office. Following are excerpts of the conversation.
Why does the Gates Foundation need a Washington office?
It wasn’t put here because Congress is here, but because other policy collaborators are predominantly here. Congress is one of them — there are [Congressional] committees that deal with education reform and international development or global health — but they’re just among many in Washington, including the World Bank, other government and health ministers who will come through town, think tanks and [Gates Foundation] grantees, like the Vaccine Fund. It’s in Washington because so many of those participants are here and in New York. I fully expect to be back and forth to New York all the time because I’m expected to cover that area as well.
If the foundation had already been based in New York, it might not have been necessary to set up this office. But foundation officers are out in Seattle, and they try very hard to participate in the right meetings, but it’s hard to cover all of them. We’re here to help them be involved, in a sustained way, with a whole set of participants, from grantees to think tanks to governments.
Why now?
It doesn’t have anything to do with any policy change but more to do with the natural next step for the foundation officials to be able to connect. They’ve been able to get a lot done but they’re frustrated they’re not as easily able to connect [with participants] from a distance.
Is the office an effort by Bill Gates to improve his image in light of the antitrust case against the Microsoft Corporation?
From all of my dealings with the foundation staff, they really want this to be a low-key office that focuses on policy, not on policy makers, not on image. [Addressing the lawsuit] has never been a topic or a theme, and I’ve never met the Microsoft people in Washington. This office is all about the ideas the foundation wants to promote. The people of the foundation are more than happy to be judged on the work they do and that was their focus in hiring me.
What are the goals of the new office?
The hope for all of us is that the staff here will be able to feed back to Seattle — to the program folks — developments, ideas, other grants being made, and information on what’s going on in their spheres here. And to represent to people here who have an interest in what the foundation is doing or who may be potential collaborators some of the ideas coming out of Seattle.
What are your job’s priorities?
It’s important to let people know that the foundation is doing good work. And the philosophy has tended to be to let the work speak for itself. The foundation wants to speak through the work done by its grantees and that’s the way it wants to influence policy as opposed to more traditional lobbying.
I don’t come here with a programmatic agenda. The foundation has worked hard to identify areas where it wants to focus, and I want to help it avoid mission creep. What I hope I can do is be able to work with lots of different people and provide a forum.
What has impressed me about the foundation is its humility. When you’re the biggest guy in the room, you don’t need to throw your weight around. That’s what I have picked up from my colleagues and I believe that’s the approach we should take in Washington. If we take that approach, we can provide a forum for parties that need to come together and find a way to collaborate and not compete.
Have you worked in philanthropy before?
No, but I have 10 years of government policy-making experience. The foundation isn’t overly wedded to doing things the way they’ve always been done. Its officials do have enormous respect for the work that has already gone on with foundations, but they certainly didn’t, in my case, provide a litmus test of having worked with foundations. What they’re looking for is people who work well with others.
How will your role with the National Economic Council affect your work with the foundation?
We were expected to be honest brokers among a variety of competing interests. That’s not exactly applicable here, but we want to be a place that funnels ideas back and forth and brings people together. In addition, I learned my way around Washington and dealt with a fair number of non-governmental organizations [in that position].
What professional accomplishment are you most proud of?
The National Economic Council was an institution that did not exist on January 20 [1993]. After the inauguration, I walked into the [White House’s] Old Executive Office Building, after finding the man with keys, hunted up office space and created an organization. We basically created a very effective institution out of nothing in a very short period. And this office is going to be a work in progress for a while as well. We’re going to have to be nimble and flexible and figure it out as we go, and I see certain parallels there.
ABOUT DAVID LANE, HEAD OF GATES FOUNDATION’S EAST COAST OFFICE
EDUCATION: Mr. Lane graduated from the University of Virginia in 1982 with a B.A. in political and social studies and received his M.P.A. in international development in 1988 from Princeton University. He also spent time in New Zealand studying town planning and politics.
PREVIOUS EMPLOYMENT: Mr. Lane worked for former Sen. Gary Hart, Democrat of Colorado, as a junior legislative assistant on foreign policy for two years. He also spent time in Latvia and Egypt doing economic-development work.
VOLUNTEER EXPERIENCE: During college, Mr. Lane served as a Big Brother mentor to a child from Charlottesville, Va.
CHARITABLE INTERESTS: Mr. Lane gives to the Whitman-Walker AIDS Clinic, in Washington, and supports environmental efforts to clean and protect the Chesapeake Bay area of Maryland, where he has a home.
HOBBY: Mr. Lane collects folk art.
