Palantir has hired former Montana Sen. Jon Tester, a Democrat who lost his 2024 reelection bid, as the data-analytics and artificial intelligence company braces for scrutiny once Democrats take control of Congress in January 2027. Tester describes the arrangement as advisory work focused on Palantir's government-services business, not lobbying.
“My agreement with Palantir is advisory in nature, it is not lobbying,” Tester said, according to NPR. He added that he will be focused on the government services side of the company's work, rather than its more controversial federal contracts. Tester, who served 18 years in the Senate and also works as an organic farmer, called the midterm election results a blue tidal wave and said the shifting makeup of Congress will shape the policy arguments Palantir needs to make going forward.
Palantir's hire lands amid broader unease in the tech industry. Companies expect heightened scrutiny from Democrats over their ties to the Trump administration, and several have been bringing on former Democratic lawmakers and staffers to help plead their case to the incoming House and Senate majorities. TechCrunch notes that Meta and other firms reportedly began strengthening Democratic ties as midterm gains looked increasingly likely, and that OpenAI hired Jessica Schumer, daughter of Sen. Chuck Schumer, shortly before the election.
Accusations of Surveillance, and a Firm Denial
Palantir, the American software and AI company that Peter Thiel named after the mythical seeing stones in J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, has been accused of allowing its tools to be used by the Trump administration to surveil Americans. The company has firmly denied it, stating it is neither conducting nor enabling mass surveillance of American citizens. Palantir says it builds tools for government agencies and private companies to organize and optimize their own information, and describes itself as committed to protecting privacy and upholding liberal democratic values.
Tester echoed that defense, saying Palantir does not build big databases or trade in private data. He also framed his own record as proof of his privacy bona fides, noting he criticized the Patriot Act's expansion of Justice Department surveillance powers and argued that his opposition was rooted in a belief that the law threatened Americans' privacy. “Palantir has a good story to tell and needs to tell it,” he said, per the same NPR report.
Not everyone is convinced the story holds up to the facts on the ground. Sen. Ron Wyden and 30 other Democratic lawmakers have demanded answers about Palantir's Department of Homeland Security contracts and the possibility that the company's tools are being used to surveil Americans. According to his Senate office, Wyden was not fully satisfied with Palantir's response, and his staff say he intends to renew his questions about the company's role in facilitating the Trump-Vance administration's use of government data once he becomes chairman of the Senate Finance Committee in the new Congress.
The ICE Contracts Fueling the Scrutiny
At the center of the controversy is Palantir's work for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The company holds a $30 million contract with ICE, and its tool reportedly provides near-real-time visibility into migrant movements. The ACLU says ICE entered that $30 million deal in April 2025 to upgrade its Investigative Case Management platform with new ImmigrationOS capabilities, but reports the broader sole-source ICM contract, which includes funding for ImmigrationOS, has since ballooned to more than $145 million.
Exactly how that system works remains murky. WIRED has reported that ICE's own contract justification document does not specify which data sources Palantir would pull from to power ImmigrationOS, leaving key questions about the tool's reach unanswered. The ACLU also notes that Palantir's Investigative Case Management platform has drawn legal challenges before, including a 2017 Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the Electronic Privacy Information Center. Separately, documents spanning 2014 to 2022 and reviewed by The Guardian covered Palantir's contract with ICE's Homeland Security Investigations unit, offering what the outlet described as rare insight into the relationship between the agency and the company.
Former Palantir employees have also pushed back internally, criticizing the company's work with the Trump administration on a migrant-tracking product and arguing it violated Palantir's own code of conduct. Palantir's largest federal contracts overall are with the Departments of Defense, Homeland Security and State, though the company also works with the Departments of Agriculture, Veterans Affairs and Health and Human Services. NPR reports Palantir is now valued at more than $350 billion and holds roughly $2 billion in federal contracts according to government records.
Karp's Politics and the Skeptics' View
Palantir CEO and co-founder Alex Karp has described himself as a liberal even as he has been openly critical of Democrats on immigration and AI policy during Trump's second term. In a 2025 interview with Axios, Karp argued Democrats should be more assertive on these issues because, in his view, many privately agree with him.
Not everyone sees Tester's hiring, or the broader industry trend, as a good-faith overture. Aya Ibrahim, a senior fellow at the AI Now Institute and a former State Department official, said tech companies may simply be using their money to avoid accountability rather than genuinely reforming their practices. Tester, for his part, predicted ICE will not continue using the same aggressive tactics moving forward, though that claim remains his own forecast rather than a settled outcome.
