Under the Trump administration, the Department of Government Efficiency has made use of the company’s technology, and several federal agencies have brought Palantir on for more work.
[Q]uestions about Palantir within government circles tend to center on concerns over the cost of the company’s products or potential difficulties in removing data from its systems. Those are concerns that Palantir pushes back on.
“No one who has actually used or researched Palantir would ever say this because it is too obviously untrue,” a company representative told FedScoop. “Our customers rely on us because Palantir’s products provide the most seamless integration with other data and software platforms, ranging from modern products to legacy data systems the government doesn’t want to upend. Our ease of integration is one of the biggest reasons customers choose Palantir.”
“It’s like taking a truck that’s full of mixed Legos,” said Leland Dudek, a former acting director of the Social Security Administration who volunteered to speak about the company in his personal capacity. “You have Legos that are big and small. [What] Palantir does is you dump those … into this special machine that automatically knows how to sort the Legos … or it can create a shape that you’ve asked it to create out of those Legos without you having to go through the manual labor yourself.”
Palantir has repeatedly emphasized that it is not a “data company,” and former employees have pushed back on the perception that the company is, on its own, collecting data about the public.
Lambert here: “On its own” is doing a lot of work, there.
Dudek, who said he worked with the company while serving on the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, called Palantir an “essential” tool for building non-obvious relationships within various sources of data. (A spokesperson for the SSA told FedScoop that before Frank Bisignano was confirmed as commissioner, the agency received a product demonstration from Palantir, but it is “not engaged in any contracting discussions” with the company.)
Palantir has earned FedRAMP authorization, making it an appealing partner for companies like Anthropic, which announced it would work with the company on bringing its Claude AI chatbot to government.
Other government officials emphasized that increased talk of Palantir is part of a broader trend that began before the Trump administration. There was already critical momentum building toward using Palantir, said one current GSA official, in part because it was deployed widely in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Some have noted the presence of company alums in some top government technology leadership positions. The most notable example is Gregory Barbaccia, who spent 10 years at Palantir, including work on investigations and counterintelligence. As the federal chief information officer and the inaugural chief federal artificial intelligence officer, Barbaccia has a large influence in setting the tone for the federal government’s use of technology, and has said that deploying AI in government is one of his primary goals.
Clark Minor, the CIO of HHS, formerly worked at Palantir, and other alums have joined the government, too, including Anthony Jancso, Akash Bobba, and Allan Mangaser.
David Sacks, the government’s AI and crypto czar, has invested in Palantir. Michael Kratsios, the director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, was previously chief of staff to Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel.
DOGE wanted to use the company’s Foundry tool to deal with legacy technology challenges that have existed for decades, the person said, and the IRS had already been using Palantir for several years for its fraud detection work, as well as work done under the Office of Criminal Investigations. When a blanket purchase agreement used by the OCI was renewed, the scope was expanded so that the Office of Information Technology could then use the BPA for its own acquisitions.
“This would obviate the need for IT to perform its own competitive acquisition, which would traditionally include evaluating other vendor offerings against a set of defined requirements,” the person added.
The IRS did not respond to that claim, but another former Treasury official said that wasn’t surprising and is a common strategy for government procurement. Notably, Sam Corcos, a DOGE member who later became chief information officer of the Treasury Department, was a big fan of the technology company, the Washington Post previously reported, and pushed to expand its Biden-era work at the IRS.
That second former Treasury official emphasized that the interest in Palantir stemmed from the Trump administration’s more aggressive interest in data and artificial intelligence. While the agency had been focused on lessening its dependence on antiquated programming languages like COBOL, the person said, DOGE was highly interested in improving the agency’s approach to the “data layer.”
Sources who worked at the Department of Homeland Security also took note of the agency’s interest in Palantir. One former agency official said it wasn’t surprising to see the increased use of Palantir at ICE, given its capabilities and the administration’s relationships with the company. Interest in Palantir came directly from Secretary Kristi Noem’s office, the Washington Post reported, and the agency later awarded the company more work, including for ImmigrationOS, a system to help ICE with deportations.
“What was shocking was the level by which the clear direction was to purchase software from a specific vendor even after these concerns and considerations were raised,” a former agency official said. “This is not to say Palantir is a bad technology; we would have been happy to have it available, but the cost and utter disinterest and clear discouragement from looking at other alternatives was truly remarkable. Had it not been unethical [to invest in the company], I would have bought Palantir shares because the level of capture was so evident.”
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