Zaid Zaid


Zaid Zaid

Board Director


Zaid A. Zaid is the Head of U.S. Public Policy at Cloudflare, and was previously the Head of North America on Strategic Response Policy at Meta. He served in the Obama Administration as Special Assistant to the President and Associate White House Counsel and before that as Senior Attorney Advisor to the General Counsel at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). Before joining the Obama Administration, he was in private practice at Wilmer, Cutler, Pickering, Hale and Dorr (WilmerHale) in Washington, D.C. While at WilmerHale, he served as a grant reader for the Middle East Partnership Initiative at the U.S. Department of State, and as the Coordinator for the Columbia Law School in Washington, D.C. program. Zaid joined WilmerHale after federal clerkships on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First and Second Circuits and the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

Zaid graduated from Columbia Law School in 2007 as a Richard Paul Richman Fellow, where he was on the Editorial Board of the Columbia Law Review. Prior to law school, he was a political officer in the Foreign Service. He served in Baghdad, at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations, at U.S. Embassy in Cairo, and he studied Arabic at the Foreign Service Institute in Tunis. Zaid earned his MALD from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy 1999 and his BSFS from the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University in 1997, where he was a Pickering Fellow.

Zaid is a past president of the Fletcher Alumni Club of Washington, DC, and also served on the Fletcher Advancement Council. He is a member of the Council of Foreign Relations, a Senior Fellow at the Center for the Study of the Presidency & Congress, a Truman National Security Project fellow, and an ICAP Fellow. Zaid serves on the Advisory Committee for the Council of Global Equality, the Board of Governors for the Georgetown University Alumni Association, and the Board of Advisors of the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown. Zaid lives in Washington, D.C. with his husband Giles P. Herman and their three sons.