On May 30, 2025, The New York Times published an article titled "Trump Taps Palantir to Compile Data on Americans," detailing a supposed combined effort between the U.S. federal government and the data software company Palantir to centralize data on American citizens.
Data privacy advocates did not take the news well, calling it "dystopian" and a massive invasion of privacy.
Four days later, Palantir posted a statement to X responding to the article, calling the reporting "blatantly untrue" because "Palantir never collects data to unlawfully surveil Americans, and our Foundry platform employs granular security protections."
On June 9, 2025, the company followed up with a long blog post on X titled "Correcting the Record: Responses to the May 30, 2025 New York Times Article on Palantir," which aimed to fact-check the article. (Snopes began researching this story before this blog post was released. We reached out to Palantir for comment but have not yet heard back; if we do, we will update this story
Since the May 30 article came out,
In this article, we aim to check the accuracy of both the New York Times article and Palantir's response to it. In doing so, we will also address the claim spreading on social media.
When two sides of a story publish conflicting accounts, the truth of the matter generally lies somewhere in the middle. Snopes' research suggested that was the case in this situation. Both the New York Times' reporting and Palantir's response omitted details relevant to the story at hand.
Snopes found the social media claim that Palantir was creating a master database of all U.S. citizens was an exaggerated version of the New York Times article's headline, which oversimplified the situation.
Here's what we found:
What does Palantir actually do?
Palantir is a company that lies at the crossroads of Silicon Valley and the Pentagon. Founded by Peter Thiel, Alexander Karp, Stephen Cohen and Joe Lonsdale in 2003, the company's website describes its mission as making "products for human-driven analysis of real-world data."
The company's founders and data tools are very Silicon Valley —
But Palantir's customer base is based around Washington, D.C. Public spending data showed the company has held government contracts since at least July 2008. The left-leaning newsroom More Perfect Union quoted Palantir CTO Shyam Shankar in 2021 saying that the company's goal was to become "the U.S. government's central operating system."
Different versions of the claim on social media listed the Palantir products Gotham and Foundry as the main ways the company was supposedly consolidating government data. Palantir's website describes Foundry as "Ontology-Powered Operating System for the Modern Enterprise" (it's an internet-based data management system) and Gotham as an "Operating system for global decision making." (It's designed for the military.) Based on those product descriptions, Foundry is the product of interest.
Palantir's connections to the administration
Palantir's response to the New York Times story acknowledged the company's extensive work with the U.S. federal government. However, it also aimed to distance itself from one of the most talked-about groups in the early months of Trump's second term — the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, which the tech billionaire Elon Musk
The New York Times and WIRED previously reported that several DOGE staffers worked at Palantir before joining the initiative. More Perfect Union found other former Palantir employees working within Trump's administration as "foreign policy advisers" and "high-level technology appointees."
On June 5, 2025, WIRED published an article claiming that Palantir's head of strategic engagement, Eliano Younes, retaliated in reaction to WIRED's reporting on connections to the Trump administration by threatening to call the police on a WIRED reporter watching software demonstrations at Palantir's booth at the AI+ expo, a free and public event open to journalists.
In its response to the New York Times article, Palantir claimed that the New York Times and WIRED's reporting was misleading because "Palantir does not control where its employees go after leaving the company" and tha
It is true that former employees of Palantir joining an administration isn't a sign of conspiracy. However, it is also true that at least one co-founder and co-owner of Palantir, Peter Thiel, is a man who has a business history with Musk and who helped bankroll the campaigns of both Vice President JD Vance and Trump.
The New York Times story found that since Trump took office, Palantir has received over $113 million in government contracts. Using
In 2025, however, the company earned its first billion-dollar contract with the Defense Department for a military surveillance system.
The Executive Order
The federal government has a lot of data. An April 2025 story from the New York Times counted 314 different pieces of information various U.S. government agencies have on file for each citizen, and suggested the total was likely even higher.
On March 20, 2025, Donald Trump signed an executive order titled "Stopping Waste, Fraud, and Abuse by Eliminating Information Silos."
The May 30 New York Times story marked this executive order as a starting point for the consolidation of information.
But
A close reading of the Executive Order is merited to better assess the intent and to observe the Order's language that specifically directs any data sharing efforts to align with existing legal authorities and procedural standards, and for the express purpose of addressing inefficiencies in government programs. Inefficiency, waste, fraud, and abuse reduction initiatives have been nonpartisan and regular focuses of multiple administrations. The statement draws on a vague rhetorical maneuver ("raising questions") to extrapolate from a common sense government initiative — that of IT modernization — to the presumption of nefarious and dystopian intent.
Describing the executive order as solely an "IT modernization" initiative is highly misleading, even when acknowledging the fact that information technology systems are listed in the executive order.
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.
It instructed all federal agencies to ensure that "Federal officials designated by the President or Agency Heads (or their designees) [had] full and prompt access to all unclassified agency records, data, software systems, and information technology systems
In simple words, the executive order stated that if the president, or anyone authorized by the president (say, a member of an initiative explicitly created by that president to reduce government waste and fraud), asked for unclassified data, agencies had to provide it.
It is true, as Palantir's response noted, that programs targeting "inefficiency, waste, fraud and abuse" have been non-partisan, and that the executive order includes wording about the legal framework. It is also true that the executive order does not explicitly mention DOGE by name.
But the executive order, without naming DOGE, still gives the agency enormous power.
DOGE's employees are federal employees. According to an interview then-DOGE figurehead Musk gave Fox News, the government is defrauded when "the computer systems don't talk to each other." Using Musk's own rationale, DOGE would therefore need to make the computer systems talk to each other (read: allow one computer system to access data from another system) in order to combat fraud.
The agency's strategy of "move fast and break things" seems to ignore whether the actions it takes are legal, based on the dozens of lawsuits filed against the initiative. (DOGE supporters, of course, can claim those lawsuits are without merit, but that argument is outside the scope of this story.)
Indeed, DOGE has attempted to interlink the various government systems, according to
So, let's discuss that question.
Where does the federal government use Palantir?
USASpending listed every federal contract with Palantir dating back to 2008 as follows.
- Department of Defense
- Department of Health and Human Services
- Department of Homeland Security
- Department of Justice
- Department of Treasury
Five federal entities had contracts totaling between $10 and $100 million:
- Department of Veterans Affairs
- Department of Energy
- Securities and Exchange Commission
- Department of Transportation
- Department of Agriculture
Finally, the following five had contracts totaling less than $10 million:
- Department of Commerce
($4.5 million) - Department of State (just under $2 million)
- General Services Administration ($750,000)
- Department of Labor ($80,000)
- Department of the Interior ($5,000)
A June story from the New York Times clarified that the Centers for Disease Control, the National Institutes of Health and the Food and Drug Administration, all within HHS, use Palantir Foundry for data management.
So, no — Palantir does not have a direct contract with DOGE. However, the existence of a direct contract does not change the facts of WIRED's reporting about DOGE employees using Palantir's technology to centralize and connect government data sources.
The April 2025 reporting from WIRED and CNN claimed that DOGE was combining Homeland Security databases with information from the Social Security Administration (SSA) and voting records to create "a master database for immigration enforcement
That
In total, Palantir software certainly isn't used throughout the federal government, as noted in the company's response to the New York Times story. However, Foundry is
As for social security, in June, the U.S. Supreme Court issued two unsigned rulings allowing DOGE to access Social Security data and shield records from a watchdog organization. Whether or not Social Security data has been moved to Foundry is unknown.
What does all this mean?
Palantir's initial response claimed the company never "collects data to unlawfully surveil Americans."
The recently published article by the New York Times is blatantly untrue.
Palantir never collects data to unlawfully surveil Americans, and our Foundry platform employs granular security protections. If the facts were on its side, the New York Times would not have needed to…— Palantir (@PalantirTech) June 3, 2025
The New York Times article never accused Palantir of breaking the law. Social media users replied to the company's statement pointing out that the word "unlawfully" could be doing a lot of heavy lifting, implying that Palantir was collecting data to surveil Americans legally.
Based on our research, this claim isn't true, because Palantir isn't the one collecting or storing the data — rather, the U.S. government is doing so. Furthermore, Palantir isn't the one attempting to compile or centralize that data — that's DOGE.
Palantir's response described their role as follows: "Our business is to provide our customers with the software capabilities to use their data effectively and in accordance to their legitimate mandates."
Assuming this is true, Palantir itself is not building any master database,
As a company that focuses on building privacy and civil liberties protective technologies, as well as one that fosters a culture of open dialogue on controversial topics impacting our business, we consider many types of risks associated with our customer engagements and products in order to help avoid or mitigate concerns. There likely may still be residual risks of misuse for any product or tool, technical or otherwise. But our efforts to discuss, understand, and address such risks are one of the reasons that some of the most critical institutions in the world spanning public, private, and non-profit sectors trust Palantir and our products.
Furthermore, there is some evidence — based on Trump's executive order, statements from Elon Musk speaking about data consolidation, previous reporting from WIRED and CNN on how Homeland Security and ICE has created an immigrant database from multiple data sources and a recent decision by the Supreme Court that allows DOGE to access SSA data — that the administration is undertaking such an initiative. Palantir's Foundry, a tool to access government data, would only be a part of such an initiative.
Paraphrasing what a source within the SSA told WIRED in April, creating a network of computers and databases that DOGE can connect to is "more feasible and quicker than putting all the data in a single place, which is probably what they really want."