Meta Builds a Bipartisan Lobbying Bench as AI Data Centers Become a Midterm Issue

For the people living near Meta's sprawling new data centers in Louisiana, Texas, Indiana and Oregon, the company's political maneuvering in Washington might seem distant from daily life. But the decisions being made in boardrooms and congressional offices right now will shape how much power their communities have over projects that strain local water, electricity grids and land, and how much say they get before the next one breaks ground.

That's the backdrop for a quiet but significant shift inside Meta. The company is building out a bipartisan team of Washington operatives, according to Axios, as it works to deepen ties with Democrats while holding onto the goodwill it has cultivated with Republicans. Think of it as an insurance policy. Regardless of which party controls Congress after the midterms, or occupies the White House down the road, Meta wants allies already in the room.

The stakes are real. Mark Zuckerberg, Meta's founder, chairman and CEO, has built a notably close relationship with President Trump in recent years, a bond that has helped the company navigate regulatory scrutiny over its AI ambitions. In September, Zuckerberg and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang joined a group of top AI executives at the White House to hammer out self-regulatory commitments. That kind of access matters when your business depends on building infrastructure the size of small cities.

A Reach Across the Aisle

In August, Zuckerberg and Meta president and vice chairman Dina Powell McCormick met with the Democratic House Commission on Artificial Intelligence and the Innovation Economy, at the invitation of Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.), according to sources familiar with the meeting. Also present were commission co-chairs Rep. Ted Lieu of California and Rep. Valerie Foushee of North Carolina. The conversation covered Meta's AI strategy, its infrastructure build-out and its economic investment plans.

Gottheimer called the sit-down "incredibly productive" in a phone call with Axios. He's trying to assemble a legislative framework for AI, and he wanted the executives' perspective before writing it. That's a reasonable ask. Lawmakers crafting rules for a technology this consequential need to understand how the companies building it actually operate, not just how critics describe them.

What the commission really wanted to understand, though, was local impact. Members were especially interested in Meta's data center investments, including its massive buildout in Richland Parish, Louisiana, and what benefits those projects actually deliver to the communities hosting them. That's a fair question, and one worth asking of any company moving this much infrastructure into small towns. Last month, Powell McCormick and other Meta executives met with Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry, a Republican, alongside prominent Louisiana Democrats including former New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu and former U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu, at a bipartisan dinner focused on the investment. The optics were deliberate: a Republican governor and Democratic power brokers, breaking bread together over a project that needs both sides' blessing to succeed politically.

Behind the scenes, Powell McCormick, a former bank executive who also served in the first Trump administration, is leading a recruitment push to staff up this bipartisan operation. Michael Hacker, a longtime aide to House Democratic power broker Jim Clyburn, recently joined as vice president of compute initiatives. Nick Schmit, a former top aide to Biden Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, came on as director of strategic partnership management. Both hires signal Meta's intent to speak fluently to Democratic lawmakers who will shape AI policy regardless of who sits in the Oval Office.

Meta hasn't neglected its Republican flank, either. Josh Raffel, who worked alongside Powell McCormick during the first Trump administration, also joined as vice president of compute initiatives. Pat Trueman, a former senior official on Trump's 2024 campaign, recently joined Meta's U.S. policy operation. Meta declined to comment on the meeting or the new hires.

This balancing act comes at a pivotal moment for the company's Washington presence. Joel Kaplan, Meta's longtime chief global affairs officer, plans to depart next year, leaving a leadership vacuum that Powell McCormick, who recently absorbed external affairs into her portfolio, is now filling with a slate of political veterans from both parties. Brian Rice, a former aide to Democratic Secretary of State John Kerry, was promoted earlier this year to lead U.S. government affairs. Tucker Bounds, who worked on John McCain's presidential campaign, was named head of global communications. C.J. Mahoney, a former Trump administration official and deputy to ex-U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, became Meta's chief legal officer in January and has since taken on broader policy responsibilities.

Put those appointments side by side, and a pattern emerges. Meta isn't picking a team. It's building a bench deep enough to win no matter who's calling plays.

Why It Matters

AI infrastructure has become a bipartisan flashpoint heading into the midterms, and polling backs that up: a University of Massachusetts national survey from September found public concern cutting across party lines. Voters in both red and blue districts are asking the same basic questions about data centers landing in their backyards. Who benefits? Who pays the environmental and economic cost? And who gets a seat at the table before the bulldozers arrive?

Meta's answer, so far, has been to invest heavily in the optics of local benefit while hedging its political bets in Washington. The company has committed $1 billion to its Future Is for Everyone Fund, aimed at supporting communities affected by its infrastructure expansion, and launched America's Workforce Academy to train workers for infrastructure-related careers. It's also leaning hard into the idea that its investments in places like El Paso, Texas, Lebanon, Indiana, and Prineville, Oregon, are bipartisan wins for local economies, not just corporate land grabs.

Whether that framing holds up depends on what communities actually experience once the data centers are running: how much water they consume, how much strain they put on local power grids, and whether promised jobs and training programs materialize at the scale Meta describes. Lobbying muscle in Washington can buy a company goodwill and regulatory breathing room. It can't, by itself, guarantee that the people living next to a 24-hour server farm feel like the deal was fair. That gap between political strategy and lived experience is likely to define how this story unfolds over the next several election cycles.