Joel Kaplan is out at Meta. The company's chief global affairs officer — and its most important backchannel to Washington conservatives for more than a decade — announced on X on Tuesday that he will leave the company next year after more than 15 years. A Meta spokesperson confirmed the departure to Reuters.
"I've decided the time is right for me to move on from my role as Chief Global Affairs Officer," Kaplan wrote. "I'll be at the company for a few months to help with the transition, and then look forward to catching my breath."
The timing is hard to miss. Kaplan's exit lands weeks ahead of the November 3 US midterm elections, with Meta pouring millions into political spending and facing intensifying scrutiny over AI safety, content moderation, and its sprawling data-center buildout. President and vice chairman Dina Powell McCormick will absorb his external-affairs portfolio, the company said.
A Republican fixer in Washington
Kaplan joined the company — then still Facebook — in 2011 and became Mark Zuckerberg's point person in Washington, a role no one else in Silicon Valley played quite the same way. A longtime Republican strategist who served as deputy chief of staff for policy under President George W. Bush, he spent years as Meta's conduit to Republican lawmakers and the broader conservative ecosystem.
He was elevated to the top policy job in January 2025 after Nick Clegg's departure, just as Meta was rolling back US fact-checking, ending diversity initiatives, and courting a newly returned Donald Trump — who had once reviled the company. Internally, Kaplan was widely credited with keeping Meta's shifting content policies consistent with Zuckerberg's "free expression" pivot.
"Joel has worked on virtually every tough issue Meta has faced," Zuckerberg said in a statement. "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. And throughout all of it, he's been a strong advocate for our policies, and a friend to me."
Powell McCormick takes the wheel
The handoff is a study in contrasts. Powell McCormick — a Goldman Sachs veteran who served in the first Trump administration, joined Meta's board in April 2025, and became president and vice chairman at the end of last year — has rapidly become the public face of the company on its data-center expansion and its defense against social-media lawsuits.
Her rise lands about nine months after Kaplan's own elevation, and as Meta has begun donating to Democrats ahead of the midterms — a hedging strategy that would have been unthinkable during the height of Kaplan's bridge-building with the right.
Leaving on his own terms
Kaplan gave no hint of friction, saying he wants to spend more time with his family and "figure out what I want to do next." He will remain at the helm of Meta's policy team through the midterm elections, leaving at some point in 2027.
His departure closes a chapter in which one person quietly shaped how a trillion-dollar company talked to power. Whoever takes the chair next inherits a job that has only gotten harder: defending AI expansion to local communities, answering for safety failures, and keeping the products online for billions — all while Washington watches closer than ever.
