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Trump Taps Palantir to Compile Data on Americans
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/30/technology/trump-palantir-data-americans.htmlThe Trump administration has expanded Palantir's work with the government, spreading the company's technology — which could easily merge data on Americans — throughout agencies.
In March, President Trump signed an executive order calling for the federal government to share data across agencies, raising questions over whether he might compile a master list of personal information on Americans that could give him untold surveillance power.
Mr. Trump has not publicly talked about the effort since. But behind the scenes, officials have quietly put technological building blocks into place to enable his plan. In particular, they have turned to one company: Palantir, the data analysis and technology firm.
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.
Mr. Trump could potentially use such information to advance his political agenda by policing immigrants and punishing critics, Democratic lawmakers and critics have said. Privacy advocates, student unions and labor rights organizations have filed lawsuits to block data access, questioning whether the government could weaponize people's personal information.
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I'm going to try to simplify what this means, and how it could go very wrong. 'Plantir Technologies' was started about 10 years ago by Alex Carp, and one of Project 2025s authors, and billionaire, Peter Thiel.
Information collected by the four federal agencies, Social Security Administration, D.H.S., Dept of Health and Human Services, and the Dept of Defense, have all kept their data and technology separate and apart. There's a reason for keeping all this data securely in their own agencies rather than bundling all the data together into one program. We have privacy laws in place, and there's a reason why each agency has kept its own 'silo' of information separate from the others.
It would be a national security nightmare if all this data is allowed to be compiled in one place. Imagine if you're a Russian hacker, an Iranian hacker or one from China, and they want to find data on Americans, they currently have to hack into multiple agencies and hack into each separate database. If all that data is in one convenient place for them, it most assuredly be the single most sought-out target for hackers. When people file their income tax for instance, they have to give information to the IRS that nobody would want to be made public, or to be hacked. The IRS holds this information securely and, thankfully, has denied DOGE access to any of it. Immigrants file income tax returns, as a matter of fact, immigrants paid $66 billion in income taxes last year. Americans have been assured a high level of privacy when they give that information to the IRS.
There are many lawsuits filed against this happening. However, lawsuits move slowly and once data is merged and information is all brought together, it's not easily untangled and sorted out. Even if courts caught up and moved fast, once data is put together, and this has already begun happening, there's nothing that can be done about it.