Former Trump adviser Dina Powell McCormick named Meta’s president

(Corrects previous job of Jennifer Newstead to former Trump administration official as a substitute of former Biden administration official, paragraph 4)

By Courtney Rozen and Jaspreet Singh

Jan 12 : Meta Platforms on Monday named former Trump administration official Dina Powell McCormick as its president and vice chairman, boosting the corporate’s lobbying efforts within the U.S. capital.

President Donald Trump congratulated Powell McCormick in a submit on his Truth Social account minutes after the corporate introduced her promotion. She is a “fantastic, and very talented, person” who served his administration with “strength and distinction,” he mentioned.

Her appointment is the most recent in a collection of modifications Meta has made within the final 12 months that extra carefully align the corporate with Trump. Meta is accelerating investments in frontier AI and private superintelligence. CEO Mark Zuckerberg is searching for Trump’s help to construct information facilities and vitality capability for these tasks.

Zuckerberg, forward of Trump’s second inauguration, visited him at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. His firm additionally scrapped its U.S. fact-checking program, elevated Republican Joel Kaplan as the corporate’s new chief world affairs officer and ended its range applications, all strikes that appealed to Trump. Meta in early January employed former Trump commerce adviser C.J. Mahoney to guide its authorized workforce, changing normal counsel Jennifer Newstead, a former Trump administration official. 

Meta declined to touch upon whether or not Powell McCormick’s appointment is meant to enchantment to Trump.

She will assist Meta develop its information facilities, construct new strategic capital partnerships and enhance the corporate’s “long-term investment capacity,” in response to an organization assertion.

Powell McCormick spent 16 years in senior management roles at Goldman Sachs. She served as deputy nationwide safety adviser to Trump in his first time period, and as a senior White House adviser below former President George W. Bush. Her husband is U.S. Senator David McCormick, a Pennsylvania Republican who chairs the Senate subcommittee chargeable for vitality coverage – an space through which she might be concerned at Meta.

The senator will “continue to comply with all U.S. Senate ethics rules,” his spokesperson Katy Montgomery mentioned by electronic mail.

“Senator McCormick should recuse himself from every vote or committee action that involves Meta’s business,” mentioned Sacha Haworth, govt director on the Tech Oversight Project, a gaggle that has criticized the business. 

Powell McCormick’s function echoes efforts by earlier Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, who throughout her tenure leveraged deep ties to the Washington institution and the Democratic Party to assist the corporate navigate scrutiny from lawmakers and regulators.

Powell McCormick resigned from Meta’s board in December, simply eight months after becoming a member of.

Meta has been scrambling to remain related in Silicon Valley’s artificial-intelligence race after its Llama 4 mannequin met with a poor reception. It dedicated as a lot as $72 billion in 2025 capital spending.