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**MAY 18, 2026**

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Donald Trump is waging war on the federal workforce, so it makes a sick kind of sense that his administration is paying millions to military surveillance company Palantir to monitor employees across multiple agencies. Spending disclosures and union officials say workers at the Department of Agriculture, Social Security Administration, and Department of Veterans Affairs will soon face new surveillance at work, though it’s not exactly clear what that will entail, ostensibly to enforce a return-to-office mandate. The likelier reason is to build a case to close office locations and to further enrich Palantir CEO Alex Karp, who remarked in his first-quarter letter to shareholders that the company was making more money from government contracts (our tax dollars) than he was from commercial customers.

**–Whitney Wimbish, staff writer**

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Moor Studio/iStock

Palantir Gets an Initial $3.9 Million to Spy on Federal Workers [link removed]

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 [link removed]. 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 [link removed] in March that the USDA had hired Palantir to help it enforce its return-to-office demand, a story based on an initial disclosure [link removed] 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. [link removed]

A request for information [link removed] 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. 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.

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