(Corrects past job of Jennifer Newstead to former Trump administration official instead of former Biden administration official, paragraph 4)
Jan 12 (Reuters) - Meta Platforms on Monday named former Trump administration official Dina Powell McCormick as its president and vice chairman, boosting the company's lobbying efforts in the U.S. capital.
President Donald Trump congratulated Powell McCormick in a post on his Truth Social account minutes after the company announced her promotion. She is a "fantastic, and very talented, person" who served his administration with "strength and distinction," he said.
Her appointment is the latest in a series of changes Meta has made in the last year that more closely align the company with Trump. Meta is accelerating investments in frontier AI and personal superintelligence. CEO Mark Zuckerberg is seeking Trump's support to build data centers and energy capacity for those projects.
Zuckerberg, ahead of Trump's second inauguration, visited him at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. His company also scrapped its U.S. fact-checking program, elevated Republican Joel Kaplan as the company's new chief global affairs officer and ended its diversity programs, all moves that appealed to Trump. Meta in early January hired former Trump trade adviser C.J. Mahoney to lead its legal team, replacing general counsel Jennifer Newstead, a former Trump administration official.
Meta declined to comment on whether Powell McCormick's appointment is intended to appeal to Trump.
She will help Meta expand its data centers, build new strategic capital partnerships and increase the company's "long-term investment capacity," according to a company statement.
Powell McCormick spent 16 years in senior leadership roles at Goldman Sachs. She served as deputy national security adviser to Trump in his first term, and as a senior White House adviser under former President George W. Bush. Her husband is U.S. Senator David McCormick, a Pennsylvania Republican who chairs the Senate subcommittee responsible for energy policy - an area in which she will be involved at Meta.
The senator will "continue to comply with all U.S. Senate ethics rules," his spokesperson Katy Montgomery said by email.
"Senator McCormick should recuse himself from every vote or committee action that involves Meta's business," said Sacha Haworth, executive director at the Tech Oversight Project, a group that has criticized the industry.
Powell McCormick's role echoes efforts by previous Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, who during her tenure leveraged deep ties to the Washington establishment and the Democratic Party to help the company navigate scrutiny from lawmakers and regulators.
Powell McCormick resigned from Meta's board in December, just eight months after joining.
Meta has been scrambling to stay relevant in Silicon Valley's artificial-intelligence race after its Llama 4 model met with a poor reception. It committed as much as $72 billion in 2025 capital spending.
(Reporting by Jaspreet Singh in Bengaluru and Courtney Rozen in Washington; Editing by Shinjini Ganguli, Chris Reese and Matthew Lewis)
