Meta’s chief global affairs officer Joel Kaplan will leave the company next year after 15 years there, a spokesperson told Reuters on Tuesday, October 20. Kaplan, who announced the move himself in a social media post, will remain for a few months to support the transition. President and vice chairman Dina Powell McCormick will add external affairs to her portfolio.
“It has been a true privilege to work with Mark — one of the great founders, builders, and strategic CEOs in history — as well as his leadership team, and the incredible Global Affairs team we’ve assembled over the years,” Kaplan wrote. “It’s been an extraordinary journey and opportunity, and I’m very proud of the team we built and work we did.” He did not disclose his next move.
A Four-Way Split Of The Global Affairs Brief
McCormick, who served in the first Trump administration, already guides Meta’s overall strategy and execution, oversees its strategic capital partnerships and co-leads the Meta Compute initiative behind its AI infrastructure build-out; external affairs now joins that list. According to Axios, first to report the departure, Kaplan plans to remain through the US midterm elections on November 3 and continue into 2027 to support the handover.
The rest of the brief is being divided rather than handed to a single successor. Chief legal officer C.J. Mahoney will also take on policy responsibilities. Brian Rice, a former aide to Secretary of State John Kerry who was promoted earlier in 2026, leads Meta’s US government affairs, and Tucker Bounds, a former spokesperson for Senator John McCain, was appointed global head of communications and public affairs in September 2026 — a deliberately cross-party bench for a company whose policy chief was its most senior Republican.
The Republican Who Ran Meta’s Washington Operation
Kaplan joined Meta in 2011 as vice president of US public policy, became vice president of global public policy in 2014, and was elevated to chief global affairs officer in January 2025 after Nick Clegg’s departure — just as Meta rolled back US fact-checking, ended diversity initiatives and sought closer ties with the incoming Trump administration. Before Meta he was deputy chief of staff for policy under President George W. Bush; he is a Harvard and Harvard Law graduate who clerked for Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and spent four years as a US Marine Corps artillery officer.
His final year in the role kept the pattern of regulatory firefighting. In August 2026 he travelled to India amid heightened scrutiny of Meta, meeting Electronics and IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw after the company caught criticism for briefly restricting a post by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, a mistake Kaplan apologised for. At home, Meta sits among the tech companies facing questions over AI’s impacts — safety concerns and the industry’s growing footprint in local communities among them — and the timing of the announcement, a fortnight before the November 3 midterms, means the transition straddles an election cycle in which Meta’s platforms and policies are again under the microscope.
Why It Matters
Kaplan’s exit matters because Meta’s government relationships are now load-bearing for its AI strategy: data-centre permits, energy deals, child-safety rules and the voluntary AI standards President Trump recently said tech executives, including Mark Zuckerberg, had agreed to. Losing the executive who personified Meta’s Washington operation — and splitting his brief four ways rather than replacing him — suggests the company expects that work to be broader and more continuous than one office can hold. It lands in the same week Meta’s policy exposure widened on other fronts, from a judge ordering it to name who approved its shadow-library torrenting to a lawsuit over its AI glasses allegedly recording private conversations — even as its consumer AI business accelerates, with Muse reaching 10 million US downloads in 40 days.
Background
Meta created the chief global affairs role in its modern form for Nick Clegg, the former British deputy prime minister, and Kaplan’s January 2025 elevation marked the company’s pivot from Clegg’s global-centrist profile to a Washington-first posture aligned with the returning Trump administration. Kaplan’s fifteen years spanned Meta’s growth from a social network into an AI infrastructure giant, and his departure — announced three weeks before the midterm elections he will stay to cover — closes the longest tenure of any Meta policy chief.
Source: Reuters via CNA, Moneycontrol
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