At a Silicon Valley off-site meeting in February for the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan were asked to reassure their staff about their philanthropy’s approach to diversity, equity and inclusion.
Dr. Chan, a pediatrician, spoke first. She told employees that words such as D.E.I. would be de-emphasized internally, according to four attendees, who were not authorized to speak publicly about the confidential meeting. But, Dr. Chan insisted in lengthy remarks, the charitable organization’s commitment would not change.
Then Mr. Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, chimed in. Their philanthropy was going to hire the best talent for the job, he said bluntly.
Within days, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative ended diversity-based recruiting and laid off or reassigned employees who ran diversity initiatives, scrubbing its website of all references. A few months later, a school for low-income students that Dr. Chan had founded announced it was closing. The philanthropy also axed its work in housing, its most progressive remaining project.
The moves capped a startling retrenchment for an organization that had once set out to be a sprawling left-of-center philanthropic endeavor. Mr. Zuckerberg, 41, and his wife, Dr. Chan, 40, had started the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative in 2015 using the wealth from their social networking empire to form a “new kind of philanthropy” and pledging to fix American education, transform U.S. public policy and “cure all disease.”
“Our hopes for your generation focus on two ideas: advancing human potential and promoting equality,” Mr. Zuckerberg and Dr. Chan wrote in an open letter about the effort to their newborn daughter, Max, at the time. They added, “We must participate in policy and advocacy to shape debates.”
Since then, some lines from that letter — including participating in policy and advocacy — were quietly deleted from the philanthropy’s website. (The organization said the deletions were inadvertent and were restored after questions from The New York Times.) And a decade on, Mr. Zuckerberg and Dr. Chan’s $256 billion commitment has been stripped down to concentrate on science efforts. The changes, which began about five years ago, gathered more steam after President Trump’s inauguration.
Last year, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative committed $336 million in grants, less than the average $846 million a year that it had given since 2018. About 69 percent of the grants were for science, up from 29 percent in 2019, it said. Grants for education formed about 12 percent of last year’s commitments, down from 33 percent in 2019. The organization has begun calling itself a “science-first philanthropy.”
It is not uncommon for young philanthropists to retool their giving as they learn from their mistakes. Many other charities have only a single focus. But it has been jarring to allies of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative to see such a wholesale discarding and downplaying of its prior work, especially given how public it had been about its goals.
“The writing was on the wall,” said Catherine Bracy, the chief executive of TechEquity, a progressive advocacy group, which received more than $2 million from the philanthropy over eight years. The couple have been “narrowing their ambition, changing their priorities, stringing people along,” she said. “It has been death by a thousand cuts.”
The changes were driven by a sense from Mr. Zuckerberg and Dr. Chan that their science funding was working while their spending in areas like education and politics was not, according to interviews with more than two dozen friends, current and former employees and others close to them. Many spoke on the condition of anonymity as they were not authorized to disclose private conversations.
Mike Schroepfer, Meta’s former chief technology officer, who has known the couple for almost two decades, said they focused on science partly because it was “much more in their wheelhouse.”
“Science was important to them from the beginning,” he said. “I think curing all disease is big enough of a single project to focus on.”
At the same time, Mr. Zuckerberg and Dr. Chan have undergone a personal political transformation, allying with the right. Their philanthropy has become a political liability, people close to them said, with pro-Trump influencers attacking the organization as liberal. At Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, Mr. Zuckerberg has also shut down diversity programs and appointed an ally of Mr. Trump to its board.
Dr. Chan, who had struck colleagues as deeply committed to progressive politics and sometimes cried when hearing personal stories on topics like immigration, is now trying to speak to conservative audiences and has privately expressed dismay about anti-Israel campus protests, two people close to her said.
When the couple attended Mr. Trump’s inauguration in January, some employees said, Dr. Chan privately seemed not to understand how her appearance might invite blowback. In a staff meeting that month, she grew emotional over what she called a “peaceful transition of power.”
In response to requests for comment, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative pointed to comments that Dr. Chan made in a newsletter to the philanthropy’s allies on Tuesday.
“We’ve learned a great deal about where we’re uniquely positioned to help — and where others might be better suited to lead. I’m proud of all of it,” she wrote. “That journey has led us to sharpen our focus on the intersection of biology and A.I., where we’re seeing transformative momentum, while still committing meaningful resources to education and to our local community.”
Meta directed requests for comment to the philanthropy. The San Francisco Standard previously reported some of the organization’s changes.
Sweeping Ambitions
Science was an immediate focus of Mr. Zuckerberg and Dr. Chan’s philanthropy. In 2015 and 2016, they were on about 80 calls with scientists to plan their strategy, one person said.
“We’d love to get together and hear your perspective firsthand on what we should be focusing on,” Mr. Zuckerberg wrote in a December 2015 email to Stephen Quake, a Stanford biophysicist, who shared the note with The New York Times. Dr. Quake said he had spent about an hour at Mr. Zuckerberg’s house, developing the idea for a “Biohub” research institution to pursue scientific challenges.
Dr. Chan and Mr. Zuckerberg hired aggressively, with the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and three Biohubs eventually employing about 1,000 workers. Staff members once got to hear Mr. Zuckerberg sing karaoke songs to them in their “Good Morning CZI” meeting. They courted the media to talk about the organization’s liberal political plans, under the tutelage of David Plouffe, President Barack Obama’s former campaign manager, who joined the philanthropy in 2017.
Dr. Chan and Mr. Zuckerberg also pushed a web-based education program in school districts across the country. She started the Primary School, the Bay Area tuition-free schools for low-income families. And the couple funneled billions into scientific research.
Starting around 2022, Dr. Chan expressed concerns that the organization was growing too fast and that costs were too high. At one point, she questioned a manager whose employee tried to expense a pair of pricey headphones and said there could be some in an electronics closet, a person with knowledge of the interaction said.
In a meeting at the couple’s home in Palo Alto, Calif., that summer, when Facebook’s stock price was reeling, Dr. Chan told attendees that the philanthropy had to make cuts because of cash-flow issues in their business empire, two people with knowledge of her comments said.
Politics, Politics
At the same time, politics started spilling over into the philanthropic initiative. During the George Floyd protests in 2020, tensions erupted over Facebook’s speech policies and whether inflammatory online posts had helped stoke the violence.
One Chan Zuckerberg employee asked Mr. Zuckerberg to resign over the issue. He began recoiling at how some of his philanthropy’s workers — many of them liberals — treated him and became dismissive of them in private conversations, four people who have spoken to him said.
That summer, he also grew concerned about the pandemic’s potential impact on voter turnout in the November election. His team, encouraged by Larry Kramer, then the head of the Hewlett Foundation, decided to donate what would become $400 million for nonpartisan election infrastructure. Several advisers warned Mr. Zuckerberg that the spending would inevitably be seen as partisan.
After the election, President Trump became irate at Mr. Zuckerberg’s involvement, referring to the $400 million as “Zuckerbucks.” It set off a right-wing uprising against Mr. Zuckerberg and Dr. Chan, who were deeply affected by the backlash, two people close to them said. Dr. Chan took the reaction as a sign to avoid anything political, they said. Her employees monitored the media for Zuckerbucks mentions as recently as last year.
“They have been struggling for years to find a way to do good philanthropy without also getting dragged into all these fights,” Mr. Kramer said.
In January 2021, the couple started jettisoning political work. In mid-2023, they laid off about 30 percent of the education team, saying that “humbling and challenging” changes were needed. That December, Dr. Chan left the board of a criminal-justice group, the Reform Alliance. A year later, she stepped down as board chair of a different criminal-justice reform organization, the Just Trust, which she seeded with $350 million.
After last year’s presidential election, Mr. Zuckerberg and a Republican political adviser, Brian Baker, met with Stephen Miller, Mr. Trump’s adviser, at Mar-a-Lago. Mr. Miller pressed Mr. Zuckerberg on his support for FWD.US, a pro-immigration group that the tech billionaire had founded and that now has additional funders, two people said. Mr. Miller declined to comment.
A few months later, Jordan Fox, the philanthropy’s chief of staff, left FWD.US’s board, a spokeswoman confirmed. Mr. Plouffe, the board chair of FWD.US, kept his seat, but the spokeswoman said he had left his role at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative this year.
In February, the philanthropy said it would halt future diversity-focused awards to scientists. Science employees felt “demoralized” about the cuts, said Jason Shepherd, a University of Utah neuroscientist, who spoke with several of them in March.
In April, closure of the Primary Schools became public, shocking many of Dr. Chan’s supporters and upsetting families who had children in the schools. The Primary School, whose board said it was closing for performance reasons, pledged $50 million to assist those it was displacing.
Jean-Claude Brizard, the board chair, said Dr. Chan was “certainly consulted” on the closure and supported the move. She had privately been frustrated by the school’s pace of progress, two people close to her said.
Many others are grappling with the fallout from the organization’s shifts. Last month, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative said it would stop giving money to almost all affordable housing and homeless advocacy groups around the Bay Area.
“The message I received from staff was very much that they felt their hands were tied,” said Lupe Arreola, the executive director of Tenants Together, a grantee. She added that the cuts would put “a sizable hole” — roughly 15 to 20 percent — in her group’s budget over the next two years.
Theodore Schleifer is a Times reporter covering billionaires and their impact on the world.
Eli Tan covers the technology industry for The Times from San Francisco.
Mike Isaac is a technology correspondent for The Times based in San Francisco. He regularly covers Facebook and Silicon Valley.
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