Trump Hands Americans' Private Data to Palantir — And Nobody's Stopping Him

Editor's note: Palantir with no-bid contracts with the US government looks to be moving towards taking over and running government agencies and if that happens thousands of US government employees will be forced to quit. The Trump administration is quietly building the surveillance state (see NET Zero, AI And Technocracy: What Happens To Freedom In A Surveillance Society?) Americans were warned about, and Palantir is holding the shovel. Since a March 2025 executive order demanded "data sharing" across federal agencies, Palantir has landed a $10 billion Army contract, embedded engineers inside the IRS, and built the ICE tracking tool that just got caught receiving Medicaid data on millions of people it was never supposed to have. Agencies are stonewalling FOIA requests, courts are being asked to force disclosure, and even Palantir's own former employees are begging the company to stop. This isn't hypothetical anymore. It's happening in real time, with your bank records, tax filings, and health data as the raw material, and almost no legal guardrail strong enough to stop it.
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Stargate: President Trump Contracts Palantir To Steal Data And Create Master Database On All Americans

The Trump administration has expanded Palantir's work across the federal government in recent months.

By The Witness | June 2, 2026

Per a New York Times report, President Donald Trump has tapped CIA-funded and backed Palantir, a data analysis and defense contractor, to collect Americans' personal data to create a new master hub to store this data as part of a federal plan to consolidate and nationalize this data.

In March, President Trump signed an executive order - "Stopping Waste, Fraud, and Abuse by Eliminating Information Silos" - that instructs government agencies to share data with each other.

The purpose of the order states: "Removing unnecessary barriers to Federal employees accessing Government data and promoting inter‑agency data sharing are important steps toward eliminating bureaucratic duplication and inefficiency while enhancing the Government's ability to detect overpayments and fraud."

Specifically, Trump's order directed the following:

Agency Heads shall take all necessary steps, to the maximum extent consistent with law, to ensure Federal officials designated by the President or Agency Heads (or their designees) have full and prompt access to all unclassified agency records, data, software systems, and information technology systems — or their equivalents if providing access to an equivalent dataset does not delay access — for purposes of pursuing Administration priorities related to the identification and elimination of waste, fraud, and abuse. This includes authorizing and facilitating both the intra- and inter-agency sharing and consolidation of unclassified agency records.

[…] Agency Heads shall take all necessary steps, to the maximum extent consistent with law, to ensure the Federal Government has unfettered access to comprehensive data from all State programs that receive Federal funding, including, as appropriate, data generated by those programs but maintained in third-party databases.

The President’s cryptic executive order caused many to wonder what this would mean for their private data, namely things such as bank account numbers, student debt, medical information, and disability status.

As noted in the NYT’s report and by other outlets such as The Tokenist, the Trump administration already has a fairly cozy relationship with Palantir, whose co-founder Peter Thiel is a staunch advocate for and donor to Trump, and a number of agencies have already purchased Palantir's technology.

The NYT reported:

The Trump administration has expanded Palantir's work across the federal government in recent months. The company has received more than $113 million in federal government spending since Mr. Trump took office, according to public records, including additional funds from existing contracts as well as new contracts with the Department of Homeland Security and the Pentagon. (This does not include a $795 million contract that the Department of Defense awarded the company last week, which has not been spent.)

Representatives of Palantir are also speaking to at least two other agencies — the Social Security Administration and the Internal Revenue Service — about buying its technology, according to six government officials and Palantir employees with knowledge of the discussions.

The push has put a key Palantir product called Foundry into at least four federal agencies, including D.H.S. and the Health and Human Services Department. Widely adopting Foundry, which organizes and analyzes data, paves the way for Mr. Trump to easily merge information from different agencies, the government officials said.

Creating detailed portraits of Americans based on government data is not just a pipe dream. The Trump administration has already sought access to hundreds of data points on citizens and others through government databases, including their bank account numbers, the amount of their student debt, their medical claims and any disability status.

Palantir's selection as a chief vendor for the project was driven by Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency, according to the government officials. At least three DOGE members formerly worked at Palantir, while two others had worked at companies funded by Peter Thiel, an investor and a founder of Palantir.

Palantir has long worked with the federal government. Its government contracts span the Defense Department and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. During the pandemic, the Biden administration signed a contract with Palantir to manage the distribution of vaccines through the C.D.C.

At the I.R.S., Palantir engineers joined in April to use Foundry to organize data gathered on American taxpayers, two government officials said. Their work began as a way to create a single, searchable database for the I.R.S., but has since expanded, they said. Palantir is in talks for a permanent contract with the I.R.S., they said.

A Treasury Department representative said that the I.R.S. was updating its systems to serve American taxpayers, and that Palantir was contracted to complete the work with I.R.S. engineers.

Palantir also recently began helping Immigration and Customs Enforcement's enforcement and removal operations team, according to two Palantir employees and two current and former D.H.S. officials. The work is part of a $30 million contract that ICE signed with Palantir in April to build a platform to track migrant movements in real time.

This latest action coincides with a recent admission by Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s "MAHA Report," which includes deploying "AI-Powered Surveillance: Create a task force to apply AI and machine learning to federal health and nutrition datasets for early detection of harmful exposures and childhood chronic disease trends."

Moreover, Trump’s latest action is congruent with the ambitions of the likes of Oracle's Larry Ellison, who was a recipient of the $500 billion Project Stargate on January 21st. Since the deal was announced, Ellison told an audience at the World Government Summit, during a segment called "Reimagining Technology for Government," that he wants to "unify" all of American’s private data and even DNA information, into a central hub.

"[…] We have to take all of this data we have in our country and move it into a single, if you will, unified data platform so we [can] provide context. When we want to ask questions we've provided that AI model with all the data they need to understand our country, so that's the big step, that's kind of the missing link.

"We need to unify all of the national data, put it into a database where it's easily consumable by the AI model, and then ask whatever question you like."

Ellison has previously described how this god-like AI will be spying in the bathroom, and users will have to request that the camera stop spying as people use the facilities, though Ellison admits that the cameras are still always running and can be accessed via court order.

"The camera is always on, you don't turn it on and off. The way you turn it on - you can't turn it off you [but you are] going to the bathroom - 'Oracle, um, I need two minutes to take a bathroom break and we'll turn it off.

"The truth is we don't really turn it off. What we do is we record it so no one can see it, but no one can get into that recording without a court order, so you get the privacy you requested, but if you get a court order - a judge can look at that, this so-called bathroom break."

Oracle's Larry Ellison Wants To 'Unify' All Of America's Data And DNA Into AI Datacenters To Be Studied And Mitigate People's Lives In A Dystopian Nightmare

THE WINEPRESS · FEBRUARY 14, 2025

Read full story

Palantir has received plenty of criticism throughout the years and their exploits and ambitions have been well documented, especially their involvement in defense, as the most recent example of their services being frequently used by Ukraine and Israel to wage their wars.

Please go to the Wine Press to continue reading.

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Editor's note: Stop waiting for Washington to fix this on its own and start applying pressure where it actually works. Call and email your senators and House rep by name, demand they back a real federal privacy law with teeth and hard limits on interagency data sharing, and don't let them dodge with vague stupid talking points to evade this issue. Back the organizations already in court forcing disclosure, American Oversight, the EFF, and the ACLU, since litigation and FOIA suits are what's actually pried loose the facts about ICE, Medicaid data, and Palantir's reach so far. File your own FOIA requests. Push your state legislators to bar state agencies from feeding data into these federal systems, since several states have already drawn that line. And strip away what you can control directly: use data broker opt out services, lock down what third parties hold on you, and stop treating "I have nothing to hide" as a reason to stay silent. None of this works if people treat it as someone else's problem. This is a fight over whether the federal government can build a surveillance file on every American without consent, and it only gets stopped if enough people refuse to shrug it off.

Related:

Site Visit to Palantir's New Denver Headquarters

Nothing new here:

Thiel...POTUS Trump with his loyalty criteria has surrounded himself with morons & idiots and dolts and dummies! "Peter Thiel Dings Trump's Loyalty Tests For 'Not Very Smart' Administration Officials"