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.

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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.

Research shows working under constant scrutiny harms workers’ physical and mental health.

“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.

THE SURVEILLANCE IS PART of Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought’s plan to strip Americans of federal services. He has spent the last year firing, pushing out, and terrorizing federal workers en masse. Nearly 348,219 workers left the federal government last year because Vought illegally fired them or because they quit or retired, according to the Pew Research Center, an 80.8 percent increase over departures in 2024.

At the same time, just 116,912 people started working for the federal government, a 55.6 percent decrease in new workers from 2024. The result is that the federal workforce is now more than 10 percent smaller than it was before Trump’s second term.

Vought, a far-right anti-abortion Christian nationalist, said last October that he wanted federal workers to be “traumatically affected” by his policies. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work, because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down,” he said. “We want to put them in trauma.”

Constantly watching workers come and go or installing “bossware” on computers will do that. Bossware, or spyware, is a kind of computer application that monitors a worker’s behavior on their computer, including surveilling the websites they visit or tracking their keystrokes. Research shows working under constant scrutiny harms workers’ physical and mental health. The Government Accountability Office said last September that digital surveillance has the power to cause increased stress, anxiety, and depression, depending on how the employer deploys it, and risks workers’ physical health and safety “by pushing them to move faster to meet productivity metrics.”

SO FAR, THE BENEFICIARY of this punishment is Palantir, which is getting rich off U.S. taxes. The company generated $1.6 billion in revenue for the first quarter of 2026, “a soaring 85% growth rate” over last year’s Q1, as CEO Alex Karp wrote in a May 4 letter to shareholders that opens with a Wittgenstein quote: “And to think one is obeying a rule is not to obey a rule.” The value of Karp’s total compensation in 2025 was $11 billion, a proxy filing shows. That’s a raise of $4.3 billion from the year before.

Palantir drew more of its Q1 revenue from U.S. tax dollars than any other source. The company took in $687 million in federal government contracts, 84 percent more than in the same period last year. It took in a lesser amount—$595 million—from domestic commercial customers.

The USDA deal is one of three big new contracts the department has awarded to Palantir so far this fiscal year, for a total of nearly $100 million in tax dollars. The others are a $94.7 million contract to centralize farm production and conservation IT systems, automate processes, and “integrate data for better efficiency per the landmark platform initiative,” and a $250,000 contract for a pilot program related to detecting fraud in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), more commonly known as food stamps.

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Whitney Curry Wimbish is a staff writer at The American Prospect. She previously worked in the Financial Times newsletters division, The Cambodia Daily in Phnom Penh, and the Herald News in New Jersey. Her work has been published in multiple outlets, including The New York Times, The Baffler, Los Angeles Review of Books, Music & Literature, North American Review, Sentient, Semafor, and elsewhere. She is a coauthor of The Majority Report’s daily newsletter and publishes short fiction in a range of literary magazines. She can be reached on Signal at wwimbish.07.