When Science Meets Politics: CZI’s Ambition and Its UCSC Blind Spot
In the summer of 2020, after George Floyd’s murder, Priscilla Chan gathered the employees of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) on Zoom. It was a raw moment. She spoke about grief, about history’s weight, about the need for staff to care for themselves even as they worked on projects meant to heal fractured systems. At that time, her message resonated. CZI’s philanthropic identity was tied to social justice, educational equity, and the idea that a technology fortune could be re-channeled into repairing social wounds.
Fast-forward to 2025, and the picture looks far murkier. Chan appeared on the dais at Donald Trump’s second inauguration, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with figures like Marco Rubio and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. For many at CZI, that image was jarring. How could the same leader who had once tearfully affirmed solidarity with Black communities now be smiling in the symbolic front row of a political order that, in their eyes, thrived on the opposite?
This is the central tension Vanity Fair unpacks: a mission divided. And it isn’t just a story about one philanthropic organization. It’s about how power bends under politics, how money built on platforms like Facebook intersects with the currents of democracy, and how institutions meant to push for justice find themselves triangulating against the winds of expediency.
What is CZI?
Founded in 2015 by Chan and Mark Zuckerberg, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is not a typical foundation. It’s structured as a limited liability company, which allows it to make grants like a nonprofit, invest in for-profit ventures, and even lobby. That flexibility was the point: CZI was supposed to move faster, act bolder, and solve bigger problems than traditional philanthropy.
Its mission is expansive: to “help solve some of society’s toughest challenges—like eradicating disease, improving education, and addressing the needs of local communities.” The focus has crystallized into four main areas:
Science – The moonshot goal is breathtaking: to help cure, prevent, or manage all human disease by the end of the 21st century. This ambition is anchored in the Chan Zuckerberg Biohubs, launched first in San Francisco and later in Chicago and New York. These labs bring together scientists, engineers, and clinicians to pursue breakthroughs in areas like single-cell biology, imaging technologies, neuroscience, and AI-powered diagnostics.
Education – Supporting personalized learning platforms like Summit Learning, and providing tools for teachers to tailor education.
Justice & Opportunity – Investing in criminal justice reform, housing affordability, and racial equity.
Local Community – Through grants to Bay Area organizations tackling homelessness, poverty, and inequality.
This combination of science moonshots and social justice initiatives was supposed to set CZI apart — philanthropy not just as charity, but as systemic change.
The Internal Fractures
But inside CZI, staff describe a creeping disillusionment. What once felt like a bold, progressive project has, they say, become cautious, even conservative. Efforts once centered on racial justice and systemic reform have been dialed back. The explanation, depending on who you ask, is either political realism — operating in an era of Trump requires neutrality — or something more venal: wealth and influence being preserved at the cost of principle.
The tension came into sharp relief in internal meetings. Staff vented about Facebook’s role in spreading disinformation and amplifying harm. One employee admitted losing sleep over it. Another asked Zuckerberg directly to step down from one of his leadership roles. His answer was revealing. Yes, Black Lives Matter, he said. But so does “giving people a voice, even when you do not like what they say.” It was classic Zuckerberg: procedural neutrality as moral defense. He also insisted CZI and Facebook were distinct.
But for employees, that separation rang hollow. Facebook’s decisions, they argued, were inseparable from the philanthropic identity of CZI, since both were powered by the same fortune, stewarded by the same couple. “I would have rather him come out and just say he was letting Trump flout Facebook’s rules out of political expediency,” one former engineer said. The evasiveness, the sense of intellectual insult, deepened frustration.
In response to rising internal anger, Chan and Zuckerberg pledged $500 million toward racial equity efforts. That’s not a small number. But philanthropy is not just about the money — it’s about credibility. Can a half-billion-dollar pledge balance out the optics of standing beside Trump, or the perception that CZI has backed away from its founding ideals? For many inside the organization, the answer is no.
The Science Question
Here’s where the paradox deepens. For all the internal tension, CZI’s science ambitions remain audacious. The vision of curing or managing all disease is not only philanthropic branding — it has real money and real infrastructure behind it. The Biohubs are well-funded, interdisciplinary, and genuinely pushing the boundaries of biomedical research.
But here’s a striking omission: UC Santa Cruz (UCSC).
In 2000, when President Bill Clinton and Prime Minister Tony Blair announced the draft sequencing of the human genome, one university had quietly done the work of assembling it: UC Santa Cruz. Led by David Haussler and his team, UCSC scientists created the first publicly available version of the human genome and put it online — free for the world. That act of open science was not just technical brilliance; it was a moral stance against privatization efforts that sought to lock up genetic information behind patents.
Today, UCSC remains a powerhouse in genomics and bioinformatics. Its genome browser is a global standard. Its labs continue to pioneer cancer genomics, DNA sequencing, and computational biology. In many ways, UCSC embodies the kind of collaborative, data-driven, and justice-infused science CZI claims to champion.
So why isn’t UCSC part of CZI’s flagship Biohub program?
The answer isn’t straightforward. Some suggest geography: the first Biohub was in San Francisco, anchored by UCSF, Stanford, and Berkeley. Others point to institutional politics: UCSC, though pioneering, has historically lacked the same elite brand recognition as its Bay Area peers. And some note that CZI has gravitated toward institutions with medical schools and large-scale clinical infrastructure — something UCSC doesn’t have.
But whatever the reason, the exclusion is telling. If the goal is to cure all disease, wouldn’t it make sense to partner with the very institution that cracked the genome? The absence raises the same question staff inside CZI are asking about politics: is this about principle and mission, or about convenience and prestige?
Fragility of Mission
This is where the broader implications come in. CZI is not just a private family foundation. It’s one of the biggest philanthropic vehicles of the tech age, with resources to rival mid-sized states. Its choices matter, not only because of where the dollars flow, but because of what they signal: whether tech wealth can be leveraged to confront structural injustice, or whether it will ultimately retreat to safer, more comfortable terrain.
The story Vanity Fair tells is less about betrayal than about fragility — the fragility of mission in the face of politics, of values in the face of power. CZI was supposed to prove that the fruits of Silicon Valley could be bent toward justice. Instead, it’s become a case study in how difficult it is to hold fast to ideals once they clash with political survival.
And maybe that’s the real lesson. Institutions, like people, don’t exist in a vacuum. They exist in a political context. And when that context shifts — when Trump 2.0 defines the landscape — the test isn’t whether leaders can write a bigger check or launch a bigger lab. It’s whether they can hold their ground.
