Entrance sign and landscaping at the Meta Platforms headquarters complex in Menlo Park, California

Meta’s Man in Washington Is Leaving, and Policy Moves Toward the Executive Running Its AI Build-Out From Menlo Park

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Top image: The entrance to Meta’s headquarters campus in Menlo Park. Photo: LPS.1 / CC0 via Wikimedia Commons

For 15 years, one Washington veteran has been at the center of the political operation of the Menlo Park company behind Facebook and Instagram. That is about to change. Joel Kaplan, Meta’s chief global affairs officer and Mark Zuckerberg’s top Washington adviser, will leave the company next year, Axios reported Tuesday.

Kaplan will stay through the Nov. 3 midterms and into 2027 to oversee a transition, according to Axios. His external affairs portfolio will move to Dina Powell McCormick, Meta’s president and vice chairman, who Axios reported spends most of her time at Meta’s Menlo Park headquarters and co-heads the company’s Meta Compute initiative to build AI infrastructure. Chief Legal Officer C.J. Mahoney will also gain policy responsibilities.

The Kaplan era

Kaplan, a former deputy White House chief of staff under President George W. Bush, built what was then Facebook’s U.S. policy team from scratch, Axios reported. He led the company’s global policy operation through years of growth and controversy, defended its personalized-ads business model from regulators starting in Europe and guided senior leaders through multiple changes in party control of Congress and the White House.

“Joel has worked on virtually every tough issue Meta has faced for more than 15 years,” Zuckerberg said in a statement to Axios. “When he arrived, there was no playbook for ensuring our products would be available to the billions of people around the world who now rely on them.”

Axios reported that Kaplan helped Meta build a strong relationship with the Trump administration. The Verge, summarizing the Axios report, noted that the exit comes during a midterm election in which Democrats are expected to win back more control in Washington.

A bipartisan bench

The transition team Axios described is notably bipartisan. Mahoney is a former Trump trade official and former Microsoft general counsel who, according to Axios, recently led Meta’s settlement on teen safety with a bipartisan group of 52 state and territorial attorneys general. Brian Rice, a former aide to Secretary of State John Kerry, was promoted earlier this year to head of U.S. government affairs. Tucker Bounds, a former spokesman for the late Sen. John McCain, was named last month as global head of communications and public affairs.

Why it matters on the Peninsula

The most telling detail may be geographic. Meta’s policy agenda is increasingly tied to physical infrastructure. Axios reported that the company is trying to strike an optimistic tone on AI and “to convince communities they can benefit from data centers.” Putting external affairs under an executive who co-leads Meta’s AI infrastructure effort, and who works mostly in Menlo Park, links the company’s politics more closely to its building program.

That program is running into local resistance, including close to home. On Tuesday, the San Mateo County Board of Supervisors began studying zoning restrictions on data centers in unincorporated areas, and cities from Gilroy to San Francisco have paused new projects, as the South Bay Chronicle has reported. Meta has not been named in those local actions, but the politics of power, water and siting are now central to every large AI company’s government relations.

The long view

Kaplan’s tenure coincided with an era when tech policy was mostly about speech, privacy and antitrust, fights waged in Washington and Brussels. The next era looks different. The decisions that most constrain AI companies may come from county boards, utility commissions and city councils deciding where data centers can go and who pays for the power lines. Meta’s choice to fold external affairs into the portfolio of an executive focused on compute suggests it sees the same shift. For Peninsula residents, that means Meta’s political weight is likely to be felt less in congressional hearings and more in local permitting fights.

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