In agency after agency — the IRS, ICE, the USDA, the Pentagon, and beyond — the Trump administration is awarding sole-source contracts to a single, politically connected data firm to build a unified surveillance infrastructure over the American people. The contracts are secret. The data is yours. The oversight is gone.
They are building a map of you. Not a rough sketch — a detailed, searchable, continuously updated dossier: your taxes, your land, your financial crimes history, your immigration status, your whereabouts, your seed purchases, your crop insurance, your cryptocurrency holdings. Agency by agency, database by database, the Trump administration has handed a single company — Palantir Technologies, co-founded by Trump ally and mega-donor Peter Thiel — exclusive, no-bid contracts to consolidate the most sensitive data the federal government holds on its citizens into a unified, AI-powered surveillance architecture. No competitive bidding. No public debate. No meaningful congressional oversight. Just a steady, quiet expansion of the most powerful data apparatus ever aimed at ordinary Americans.
The scope is staggering, and the pace has accelerated dramatically in 2025 and 2026. According to USASpending.gov data reported by The Hill, Palantir’s federal contracts grew from $541 million in 2024 to nearly $970 million in 2025 — almost doubling in a single year. Now, just four months into 2026, the company has secured hundreds of millions more in sole-source awards. This is not normal government contracting. This is preferential, ideologically driven deployment of public funds to a politically connected firm, conducted in defiance of procurement norms, privacy law, and basic democratic accountability.
1. The Contracts: A Government-Wide Footprint
To understand the scale of what is happening, one must survey the terrain. Palantir’s software now runs — or is actively being deployed — in nearly every corner of the federal government that touches the lives of ordinary Americans. The pattern is consistent: sole-source justifications, opaque performance work statements, and political relationships that raise serious conflict-of-interest concerns.
Since 2018, the IRS has paid Palantir over $130 million to use its Gotham and Foundry platforms to mine tax returns, bank statements, ACA data, Treasury FinCEN records, and cryptocurrency transactions on millions of Americans. The Intercept, April 24, 2026.
Palantir built ImmigrationOS for ICE — a system to track “self-deportations” in near real-time and generate enforcement leads. The system pulls from “external” data sources beyond DHS records. American Immigration Council, 2025.
A $300 million no-bid Blanket Purchase Agreement consolidates every American farmer’s land, conservation, insurance, and financial program data into a single Palantir Foundry profile. FedScoop, April 22, 2026.
The Pentagon awarded Palantir a contract worth up to $1.3 billion to lead AI-powered data fusion programs across the U.S. military — the same platform architecture being deployed on domestic civilian agencies. Senate Finance Committee Letter, June 2025.
A separate sole-source USDA contract deploys Palantir for “real-time analytics” and “continuous compliance monitoring” of federal workers’ office attendance — the same surveillance playbook, turned on government employees. State of Surveillance, March 2026.
Palantir’s Foundry software has been embedded in the Department of Health and Human Services, the FDA, CDC, NIH, and Social Security Administration, giving the platform a reach into health, benefit, and personal record systems. MeriTalk, June 2025.
2. The Farm Files: Rural America Under Surveillance
The most recent and perhaps most symbolically striking contract is the April 2026 sole-source award of a $300 million Blanket Purchase Agreement to Palantir by the United States Department of Agriculture. As reported by Tech Funding News, the contract implements the “One Farmer, One File” initiative: every American farmer who interacts with the USDA — through the Farm Service Agency, the Natural Resources Conservation Service, or the Risk Management Agency — will have all their data consolidated into a single, unified Palantir Foundry profile.
The official rationale is modernization and efficiency. The reality is the construction of the most comprehensive database of American agricultural life ever assembled: land holdings, acreage, crop insurance claims, conservation program enrollments, disaster assistance applications, and financial records, all fused into a single searchable repository. Industry analyst publication Techi noted that USDA bypassed competitive bidding entirely, justifying the sole-source award on the grounds that Palantir was the only vendor with existing federal accreditations and data model integrations capable of meeting the administration’s timeline — a justification that conveniently forecloses any public competition.
The administration insists the farm database will not be shared with other agencies. But that assurance rings hollow against the backdrop of an executive order President Trump signed in March 2025 explicitly directing agencies to modify or rescind regulations that interfere with inter-agency data sharing. The architecture is being built. The legal guardrails are being dismantled. What happens when an administration that has already shared IRS data with ICE gains access to a unified federal profile of every American farmer?
“The unprecedented possibility of a searchable, ‘mega-database’ of tax returns and other data… is a surveillance nightmare that raises a host of legal concerns, not least that it will make it significantly easier for Donald Trump’s Administration to spy on and target his growing list of enemies and other Americans.”
— Sen. Ron Wyden & Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Letter to Palantir CEO Alex Karp, June 17, 2025
3. A Timeline of Quiet Consolidation
IRS Criminal Investigation division begins using Palantir’s Lead and Case Analytics platform, integrating tax returns, ACA data, bank records, and FinCEN financial crime data. The contract, later revealed to total over $130 million, is awarded without public fanfare. (The Intercept)
President Trump signs an executive order directing agencies to rescind regulations impeding inter-agency sharing of unclassified data — laying the legal groundwork for merging the siloed databases Palantir is building across the government. (FedScoop)
ICE awards Palantir a $30 million ImmigrationOS contract to provide near real-time tracking of migrants and “produce leads” for deportation operations, drawing on external data sources beyond DHS databases. (NPR)
Ten lawmakers led by Sen. Ron Wyden and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez send a formal demand letter to Palantir CEO Alex Karp, citing potential violations of the Privacy Act of 1974 and Internal Revenue Code Sections 6103 and 7213A. (Senate Finance Committee)
Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins announces “One Farmer, One File” at Commodity Classic. Palantir’s Landmark platform processes over $4.4 billion in farm payments in its first five days, demonstrating the scale of data now flowing through the system. (DTN)
Watchdog group American Oversight files suit against the IRS, ICE, CDC, DHS, and SSA for refusing to release records on their use of Palantir surveillance systems — accusing the administration of stonewalling legitimate FOIA requests. (Law&Crime)
USDA formalizes the $300 million sole-source Palantir BPA. The Intercept simultaneously reveals the full scope of Palantir’s IRS data mining contract, prompting 30 lawmakers led by Rep. Dan Goldman, Rep. Nydia Velázquez, and Sen. Ron Wyden to demand a congressional investigation. (Congressman Goldman)
4. Conflicts of Interest: Who Profits When You Are Watched
The financial relationships embedded in this surveillance apparatus are as troubling as the surveillance itself. The Hill confirmed that White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller — the chief architect of the immigration policies that ImmigrationOS was built to enforce — held tens of thousands of dollars in Palantir stock. The White House claims he divested early in the administration; independent verification is unavailable, and no formal recusal was announced during the period his office was directing immigration enforcement strategy.
Peter Thiel, Palantir’s co-founder, was a major donor to Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and a prominent advocate for his return to power in 2024. Thiel’s venture capital network has extensive ties to the administration’s economic advisers and personnel. The company was quite literally founded to serve the national security state, and it has now become the primary technological infrastructure of that state under the president it helped elect.
An investigation by NOTUS revealed that congressional members from both parties — including several Democrats who publicly criticized Palantir’s ICE work — purchased Palantir stock during 2025 as its value rose more than 100 percent. The revolving door between government and Palantir is equally disturbing: multiple alumni of Palantir’s workforce have taken positions within Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, the extra-governmental entity that has gained access to federal databases across multiple agencies and has itself been sharing that access with Palantir’s platforms.
“Palantir Technologies’ platform grants immense power to its users, helping control the data, decisions, and outcomes that determine the future of governments, businesses, and institutions — and by extension, all of us.”
— 13 Former Palantir Employees, Open Letter, May 2025
5. The Privacy Catastrophe: What This Means for Every American
Privacy experts and civil liberties organizations have been unambiguous about what this pattern represents. American Oversight director Chioma Chukwu stated that “when the government builds vast systems like this in secret, the public has no way of knowing how that power is being used or who it is being used against.” The ACLU has detailed how Palantir’s Investigative Case Management system at ICE links phone numbers, GPS data, social network data, Social Security numbers, financial records, and ISP data into a single searchable profile.
The danger is not hypothetical. The Intercept reported that IRS Criminal Investigations — the agency now running Palantir’s massive-scale data mining — has been redirected under Trump’s orders away from investigating wealthy tax cheats and toward investigating “left-leaning groups.” It was separately disclosed in court filings that the IRS improperly shared confidential taxpayer information with ICE to facilitate deportations — a potential criminal violation of federal tax law. The infrastructure that Palantir built for legitimate law enforcement is now being operated by an administration that has demonstrated a willingness to weaponize it against political opponents.
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Representative Jamie Raskin, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, has captured the trajectory with characteristic precision. As Raskin and his colleagues warned DHS, the history of surveillance technology is that techniques developed against noncitizens are rapidly turned on the citizen population. The farmer database being built today, the tax data being mined today, the immigration tracking being refined today — these systems do not disappear when the political winds shift. They remain, they expand, and they wait for whoever holds the executive power next.
An Executive Unfit to Guard the Powers He Is Accumulating
The 25th Amendment to the United States Constitution, ratified in 1967, established the mechanisms by which a president who is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office” may be temporarily or permanently removed. Section 4 — the most powerful and least-used provision — allows the Vice President and a majority of the Cabinet to declare the president incapacitated and transfer power to the Vice President. Congress then has 21 days to affirm or reject that declaration by a two-thirds vote of both chambers.
The Case Being Made
The accumulation of unchecked, secretive surveillance power in the hands of a president whose judgment has been questioned across the political spectrum is precisely the scenario the 25th Amendment’s architects feared. Rep. Jamie Raskin introduced legislation on April 14, 2026, with 50 Democratic co-sponsors, to establish a Commission on Presidential Capacity under Section 4 — citing a pattern of “increasingly volatile and unstable” behavior that constitutes a national security risk. More than 70 Democratic lawmakers have co-signed calls for the 25th Amendment’s invocation. Illinois Governor JB Pritzker made the explicit case that a president building a surveillance architecture while exhibiting signs of severe cognitive and behavioral instability is not a hypothetical constitutional concern — it is an active one.
Who Has Called for Action
Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut stated publicly that if he were a Cabinet member, he would spend the Easter recess consulting constitutional lawyers about Section 4. Representative Maxine Waters introduced a formal 25th Amendment resolution after Trump moved to purge independent members of the Federal Reserve board. Raskin’s formal letter to the White House Physician demanded a comprehensive cognitive and neurological evaluation — the same standard Republicans established during the Biden administration — and full public disclosure of the results.
The Constitutional Argument
The argument is not merely about erratic social media posts or combative press conferences. It is about the specific combination of cognitive instability and the accumulation of surveillance infrastructure. A president who directs agencies to dismantle Privacy Act guardrails, awards no-bid contracts to a political ally’s firm to build a whole-of-government data apparatus, then weaponizes that apparatus against political enemies and vulnerable populations — while simultaneously exhibiting documented signs of cognitive decline — represents a constitutional crisis that the 25th Amendment was designed to address. The concern is not that Trump is too old. It is that he is too dangerous, too erratic, and too compromised by personal and political interests to be trusted with the unprecedented power he is concentrating.
The Practical Barriers — And Why They Do Not Negate the Moral Case
The barriers are real. Section 4 has never been invoked against a sitting president. It requires the Vice President and Cabinet majority to act against the man who appointed them — a near-impossible political ask in the current moment, where Republican officeholders have demonstrated consistent loyalty over constitutional obligation. The two-thirds congressional supermajority threshold makes legislative confirmation equally implausible. But the moral and constitutional case does not require political plausibility to be valid. The 25th Amendment exists precisely for moments when normal political incentives fail to constrain executive power. The fact that Congress lacks the will to use it does not mean the nation lacks the need. It means the nation lacks the leadership — and that failure of leadership is itself part of the indictment.
6. What This Says About His Priorities — And His Fitness to Lead
Leadership, at its most fundamental, is the exercise of power in service of the people who granted it. What the Palantir contracts reveal is an administration whose priorities are inverted: a president who uses the state’s power to surveil the people rather than serve them, who rewards political allies with billions in exclusive contracts rather than subjecting those contracts to the scrutiny that public funds demand, and who dismantles the legal guardrails designed to prevent exactly this kind of abuse.
Consider the choices being made. At the precise moment this administration is awarding Palantir a $300 million no-bid contract to build a unified database of America’s farming families, it is simultaneously cutting rural extension services, reducing food safety inspection staff, and forcing out career agricultural scientists through DOGE-directed mass terminations. The message is clear: the administration is not interested in serving farmers. It is interested in watching them.
The former Palantir employees who signed an open letter in May 2025 — engineers and managers who joined the company believing in its stated commitment to civil liberties — warned that “democracy faces escalating threats: biometric data collection on immigrant children, journalists being targeted, science programs defunded, and key U.S. allies sidelined.” They described the administration as having “sought to greatly expand executive powers while alluding to monarchy.” These are not words from partisan opponents. These are the people who built the tools now being deployed against the American public.
A president with sound judgment and genuine commitment to constitutional governance would not build a surveillance state in secret. He would not award billions to a co-founder’s company without competitive bidding. He would not sign executive orders dismantling the very privacy protections that prevent the system he is building from being weaponized. He would not invite Palantir’s CEO to a private White House dinner while simultaneously awarding the company’s largest-ever federal contract portfolio. These are not the choices of a disorganized leader. They are the deliberate choices of one whose priorities — power, loyalty, and control — have displaced the constitutional obligations of the office he holds.
Editorial Conclusion
The Trump administration is building a surveillance state, and it is doing so with your tax dollars, through secret contracts, in defiance of privacy law, and in service of a political ally who helped put this president in power. The “One Farmer, One File” database, the IRS tax-mining operation, the ImmigrationOS deportation engine, the Pentagon’s AI data fusion platform — these are not separate programs. They are components of a single architecture: a government with the technical capacity to know everything about everyone, operated by an administration that has already demonstrated the willingness to use that knowledge against its enemies. The 25th Amendment exists for moments when the exercise of presidential power becomes a threat to the republic rather than its servant. We are in such a moment. The barriers to invoking it are political; the case for invoking it is constitutional, moral, and urgent. What is required now is not caution. What is required is courage — from Cabinet members, from Republican lawmakers who have not yet surrendered entirely to party over country, and from an American public that must demand, loudly and without cease, that its data, its dignity, and its democracy be returned to it.
Sources & References
- The Intercept — “Palantir Is Helping Trump’s IRS Conduct ‘Massive-Scale’ Data Mining” (April 24, 2026)
- The Hill — “Palantir courts major federal contracts — and controversy — in Trump era” (Jan. 3, 2026)
- FedScoop — “Agriculture Department kicks off $300M Palantir deal” (April 22, 2026)
- Tech Funding News — “USDA, Palantir ink $300M deal to modernise federal farm systems” (April 23, 2026)
- DTN Progressive Farmer — “Palantir Secures USDA Contract to Consolidate Farmer Data” (April 23, 2026)
- Techi — “Palantir Wins a $300M BPA from USDA to Build ‘One Farmer, One File'” (April 22, 2026)
- Senate Finance Committee — Wyden & Ocasio-Cortez Demand Answers from Palantir (June 17, 2025)
- Senate Finance Committee — Full Letter to Palantir CEO Alex Karp, PDF (June 17, 2025)
- American Immigration Council — “ICE to Use ImmigrationOS by Palantir” (August 2025)
- NPR — “Former Palantir workers condemn company’s work with Trump administration” (May 5, 2025)
- Law & Crime — “Trump admin violating FOIA by refusing to release Palantir documents” (April 21, 2026)
- Rep. Dan Goldman — Goldman, Wyden, Velázquez Demand Answers on ICE Palantir Surveillance (April 2026)
- ACLU — “All the Ways Palantir is Assisting Trump’s Abusive Removal Campaign” (April 2026)
- NOTUS — “These Democrats Decry Trump’s Immigration Actions. They Also Invested in Palantir.” (Feb. 2026)
- MeriTalk — “Democrats Press Palantir on Alleged Data Surveillance Scheme” (June 20, 2025)
- Tax Notes — “Palantir Contracts Under Scrutiny Amid IRS Tax Data Controversy” (Feb. 2026)
- MS Now — “Raskin offers bill setting up 25th Amendment process to remove Trump” (April 14, 2026)
- House Judiciary Democrats — Raskin Demands Cognitive Evaluation of Trump (April 10, 2026)
- The Fulcrum — “Is Pritzker Right? Is It Time To Invoke the 25th Amendment?” (Oct. 2025)
- International Bar Association — “Comment and analysis: President Trump and the 25th Amendment” (Dec. 2025)
- State of Surveillance — “Palantir’s New Target: Federal Workers” (March 2026)
- FedScoop — “The government’s embrace of Palantir is years in the making” (Sept. 2025)
