Palantir Gets an Initial $3.9 Million to Spy on Federal Workers

The contract kicks off a Trump administration plan to track workers at the Social Security Administration and Departments of Agriculture and Veterans Affairs.

https://prospect.org/2026/05/18/palantir-federal-workers-surveillance-usda-social-security-veterans-affairs/



The Trump administration is building a surveillance network to spy on its own workforce across multiple agencies. It has already given Palantir an initial $3.9 million to do so at the Department of Agriculture (USDA), federal spending disclosures show. The artificial intelligence war profiteer will “design, configure, deploy and manage a secure, user-friendly tool to track USDA employees’ return to the office,” according to a disclosure. The contract started May 1 and has the potential to grow to $13.3 million over the next fiscal year, which runs from October 1 to September 30. The Lever first reported in March that the USDA had hired Palantir to help it enforce its return-to-office demand, a story based on an initial disclosure justifying the reasoning behind the department’s opting for a sole-source contract, commonly known as a no-bid contract, before a dollar amount had been published. Since then, union officials and additional spending disclosures show that the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and the Social Security Administration (SSA) are seeking to implement similar programs.

A request for information published March 11 shows that the VA wants a tech company to build a tool for it to passively gather, measure, and report daily occupancy counts of its 311 owned and leased off-campus administrative locations across the continental U.S. Like the USDA, the VA says it needs the surveillance tech because of an in-person work requirement. Federal worker union officials said the SSA is a third agency where the administration is surveilling workers coming and going from offices and measuring occupancy levels. “These spending disclosures reveal that the Trump-Vance administration is more interested in monitoring and intimidating public servants than in actually governing,” Michael Martinez, managing counsel of Democracy Forward’s Civil Service Strong, told the Prospect in an email. “Civil Servants have rights and Democracy Forward is committed to defending those rights and holding this administration accountable when it crosses the line.”

Union officials with AFGE Council 220, which represents SSA workers, said they expect the surveillance at that agency is a prelude to consolidating or outright shuttering of more offices nationwide, based on a determination that too few people work at certain sites to justify keeping them open. But staff levels are low because DOGE pushed out 7,000 SSA workers last year, so swipes in and out of offices will be lower because of that, AFGE officials said. A better measure of office use would be assessing the needs of the people who use them, which would also show the need for more, not fewer, workers. “SSA is already stretched thin as we face a 59-year staffing low,” AFGE Council 220 President Jessica LaPointe said in a press statement. “Determining office usage based solely on the number of staff in attendance creates a false narrative that offices are underused or under needed. In reality, they are simply understaffed.”

Trump has already closed at least three Social Security field offices to in-person service for more than a year with no plans to reopen them, in Decorah, Iowa; Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania; and Logan, West Virginia. “The limited budget should be focused on hiring staff to improve service to the public,” LaPointe said. “Investing in systems that could ultimately be used to close offices across the country sends the wrong message, especially as wait times are high and the number of beneficiaries continues to increase daily.” Spokespeople at the USDA and Social Security Administration did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson at the VA did not answer questions by deadline that queried when the agency expects to implement the technology and what it plans to do with the information it collects.

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