Since last March, the Department of Health and Human Services has been using AI tools from Palantir to screen and audit grants, grant applications, and job descriptions for noncompliance with President Donald Trump’s executive orders targeting “gender ideology” and anything related to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), according to a recently published inventory of all use cases HHS had for AI in 2025.
Neither Palantir nor HHS has publicly announced that the company’s software was being used for these purposes. During the first year of Trump’s second term, Palantir earned more than $35 million in payments and obligations from HHS alone. None of the descriptions for these transactions mention this work targeting DEI or “gender ideology.”
The audits have been taking place within HHS’s Administration for Children and Families (ACF), which funds family and child welfare and oversees the foster and adoption systems. Palantir is the sole contractor charged with making a list of “position descriptions that may need to be adjusted for alignment with recent executive orders.”
In addition to Palantir, the startup Credal AI—which was founded by two Palantir alumni—helped ACF audit “existing grants and new grant applications.” The “AI-based” grant review process, the inventory says, “reviews application submission files and generates initial flags and priorities for discussion.” All relevant information is then routed to the ACF Program Office for final review.
ACF staffers ultimately review any job descriptions, grants, and grant applications that are flagged by AI during a “final review” stage, according to the inventory. It also says that these particular AI use cases are currently “deployed” within ACF, meaning that they are actively being used at the agency.
Last year, ACF paid Credal AI about $750,000 to provide the company’s “Tech Enterprise Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) Platform,” but the payment descriptions in the Federal Register do not mention DEI or “gender ideology.”
HHS, ACF, Palantir, and Credal AI did not return WIRED’s requests for comment.
The executive orders—Executive Order 14151, “Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing,” and Executive Order 14168, “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government”—were both issued on Trump’s first day in office last year.
The first of these orders demands an end to any policies, programs, contracts, grants that mention or concern DEIA, DEI, “equity,” or “environmental justice,” and charges the Office of Management and Budget, the Office of Personnel Management, and the attorney general with leading these efforts.
The second order demands that all “interpretation of and application” of federal laws and policies define “sex” as an “immutable biological classification” and define the only genders as “male” and “female.” It deems “gender ideology” and “gender identity” to be “false” and “disconnected from biological reality.” It also says that no federal funds can be used “to promote gender ideology.”
“Each agency shall assess grant conditions and grantee preferences and ensure grant funds do not promote gender ideology,” it reads.
The consequences of Executive Order 14151, targeting DEI, and Executive Order 14168, targeting “gender ideology,” have been felt deeply throughout the country over the past year.
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Early last year, the National Science Foundation started to flag any research that contained terms associated with DEI—including relatively general terms, “female,” “inclusion,” “systemic,” or “underrepresented”—and place it under official review. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention began retracting or pausing research that mentioned terms “LGBT,” “transsexual,” or “nonbinary,” and stopped processing any data related to transgender people. Last July, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration removed an LGBTQ youth service line offered by the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.
By the end of the year, across the NSF and National Institutes of Health, nearly $3 billion in grant funds were either frozen or terminated.
Waves of layoffs affected workers across various agencies—the Department of Education, the Energy Department, and the Office of Personnel Management—and sometimes included people who didn’t have job functions related to DEI. Other workers at agencies the Internal Revenue Service and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration were rerouted from their normal job functions and tasked with purging anything believed to be related to DEI or “gender ideology.” In NASA’s case, this included any mentions of women, indigenous people, or LGBTQ people from the agency website.
Transgender people were systematically excluded from programs that are run by the federal government or receive federal funding. Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) applicants and people filing discrimination charges to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission were banned from identifying as nonbinary. The Department of Housing and Urban Development stopped enforcing an internal provision that banned discrimination on the basis of gender identity, and the Department of Veterans’ Affairs changed its internal guidelines to remove language banning its doctors from discriminating on the basis of political beliefs or marital status, reportedly citing the executive order in its reasoning.
In the private sector, more than 1,000 nonprofit organizations rewrote their mission statements last year to remove any language believed to be adjacent to DEI, seemingly in an effort to avoid losing federal funding. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and the Rape, Abuse, & Incest National Network removed any mentions of trans people, who are disproportionately more ly to be victims of sexual abuse, from all of their public materials.
Palantir, for its part, has fared remarkably well under the second Trump administration. It earned more than $1 billion in net payments and obligations during Trump’s first year back in office, compared to about $808 million in the year preceding it. In that year, the company’s two highest paying federal customers were the US Army and US Air Force, which respectively paid and obligated a net of $408 million and $148 million to Palantir.
However, some of Palantir’s most public-facing work has been as a major contractor for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which has been carrying out widespread, disruptive, and violent operations across the country. In the year ing Trump’s second inauguration, the company earned a net of $81 million in payments and obligations from ICE, compared to $20.4 million in the preceding year.
In April, ICE added $30 million to an existing contract for the company to build a tool that would provide ICE “near real-time visibility” on people self-deporting from the country and help ICE select who it should deport, with priority given to “visa overstays,” according to a contract justification published in the Federal Register.
The contract was previously worth about $17 million and primarily focused on building and maintaining the Investigative Case Management System (ICM), a version of Palantir’s commercial law enforcement product, Gotham, which stores information about current and former ICE investigations.
Palantir is also paid to build and maintain the FALCON Search & Analysis System, which takes in data from the ICM and several other databases—including ICE’s public tip line, as WIRED revealed last week—and makes it searchable. Palantir has also been paid to develop an ICE app called “Enhanced Leads Identification & Targeting for Enforcement” (ELITE). The app takes in data from HHS and a variety of other sources, as 404 Media first reported, and creates detailed dossiers on potential suspects. It includes a map tab where ICE agents can define a perimeter, see which individuals could be in that area, and provide a confidence score for how ly they are to be there.
Palantir’s leadership has consistently defended its work for ICE. However, as reported by WIRED, employees have questioned on Slack whether the company can put pressure on ICE, and pushed for the company to provide more transparency on its work with the agency. The discussions came in the wake of January 24’s fatal shooting of Minneapolis nurse Alex Pretti at the hands of Border Patrol and Customs and Border Protection agents who were deployed alongside ICE agents as a part of what the Department of Homeland Security has called “Operation Metro Surge.”
