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Republican privacy advocates in Congress are criticizing the Trump administration’s work with the tech giant Palantir to analyze what could become a massive pool of government data on Americans.
President Donald Trump signed an order in March that directed federal agencies to remove “unnecessary barriers” to data consolidation. Even before that, as The New York Times reported last week, Palantir had expanded the reach of its artificial intelligence product within the US government — potentially building an interagency database that would merge huge sets of government information on Americans, from medical to financial.
Palantir provides tech to companies and governments that helps them act on the information they collect — a service gaining traction as large language models make it easier to analyze data at scale. The US government has long lagged the private sector in that sort of analysis — but where Silicon Valley sees a chance to make government more efficient, some lawmakers in both parties see an invitation to misuse.
“It’s dangerous,” Rep. Warren Davidson, R-Ohio, told Semafor. “When you start combining all those data points on an individual into one database, it really essentially creates a digital ID. And it’s a power that history says will eventually be abused.”
“I hope to turn it off, fundamentally,” Davidson added. He compared a Palantir-facilitated merged database to the dangerously powerful ring from the Lord of The Rings: “The only good thing to do with One Ring to Rule Them All is to destroy the Ring.’”
Resistance like Davidson’s is striking because few congressional Republicans have publicly challenged the president since his second term began. Neither the sweeping cutbacks of DOGE nor Trump’s punitive global tariffs have caused a real GOP rebellion, and the party is currently reinterpreting years of fury about deficits to push through a megabill that adds trillions of dollars in debt.
It’s far from clear that the work by Palantir — whose co-founder Peter Thiel is a longtime backer of Vice President JD Vance — will end up sparking a significant GOP attempt to rein in the Trump administration. Davidson said he hopes to mount a bipartisan push to include language that would shut down the effort in legislation reauthorizing the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which is set to lapse next year.
The Ohioan is often a conference outlier. Still, several other GOP lawmakers and aides said they shared his concerns.
“The concern out there will always be: If you had the wrong people in government, are there protections to make sure that privacy is protected?” Sen. Mike Rounds, R-S.D., who co-chaired his chamber’s AI caucus last Congress, told Semafor. “And that’s a fair question to have.”
One House Republican aide, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly, put it far more bluntly: “This is the first time in a while I’ve thought, ‘Oh boy, this is really bad.’”
“These guys are freaks with no sense of humor and a very disturbing sense of morality — and now they have all the data,” the aide said of Palantir. “Someone should do something.”
Palantir said in a statement on X that the New York Times report “is blatantly untrue.” The company is “not surveilling Americans,” CEO Alex Karp told CNBC Thursday.
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Data privacy has divided the Republican Party before. Conservatives in the House temporarily derailed an effort by their own leaders to reauthorize a key foreign surveillance law last year, citing worries about excessive government wiretapping powers.
“All I’ve seen is what’s in social media — and it sounds bad,” Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., who played a lead role in last year’s surveillance fight, said of Palantir. “I’m concerned.”
Massie and Davidson, notably, were the only two House Republicans to oppose Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” in the House last month. But Davidson said the Palantir news has rankled a broader coalition of civil liberties-minded GOP lawmakers.
“The Republicans that are essentially part of the anti-PATRIOT Act, anti-surveillance state, pro- ‘get a warrant’ side kind of collectively share a concern about where this is headed,” Davidson said.
That includes Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., who told Semafor that she has “a lot of questions” about Palantir’s work inside the Trump administration.
“I’m big on sharing data — but for the right purposes, and as long as we’re protecting people’s privacy,” Mace said.
The View From Democrats
Democrats on both sides of the Capitol sound eager to work with Republicans to rein in Palantir, which is known for its secrecy and the occasionally bombastic rhetoric of its leadership. (CEO Alex Karp said on an earnings call earlier this year that the company wants “to disrupt and make the institutions we partner with the very best in the world and, when it’s necessary, to scare enemies and on occasion kill them.“)
Rep. Suzan DelBene, D-Wash., told Semafor that “Americans should be extremely alarmed that the Trump administration is creating a central government database with our sensitive financial, health, and personal information.”
“A database like this can be easily abused by this or any president, and put Americans at risk of a massive data breach,” DelBene added.
An aide said Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., is also “extremely concerned about the reports and seeking more information from the administration on what Palantir is up to.” Wyden recently introduced legislation that would block DOGE’s access to agency data.
The View From The White House
“President Trump signed an executive order to eliminate information silos and streamline data collection across all agencies to increase government efficiency and save hard-earned taxpayer dollars,” White House assistant press secretary Taylor Rogers said in response to the lawmakers’ comments.
Eleanor’s view
There’s a key difference between this brewing Palantir fight and last year’s surveillance battle: Trump was, at least briefly, aligned with conservatives in opposition to unfettered expansion of that wiretapping law.
Republicans may be more reluctant to speak out this time if it means resisting his agenda — particularly after many of them were wrangled into abandoning their initial goals for the tax-and-spending bill. Davidson and Massie, given their votes on that legislation, are not exactly bellwethers for the rest of their party.
But unlike other issues like trade, few Republicans see data consolidation as a critical priority for Trump. So there’s a real possibility that they decide this is an area where they can afford to assert themselves.
Room for Disagreement
Palantir’s data-merging contracts are running largely under the radar. It’s a relatively wonky issue that could easily lose ground in Washington to the GOP’s sprawling tax-and-spending package and codifying DOGE’s cuts to federal spending.
Half a dozen Republicans who have previously spoken out about civil liberties, including Mace, said this week that they didn’t know enough yet about the administration’s database-building plans with Palantir to form an opinion.
“I’ve seen the headlines, but I haven’t seen the specifics — so until I review the specifics, I’ll refrain from commenting,” Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, said.
Notable
- Palantir has worked with DOGE at the IRS this year on database construction, as Wired reported.
- The company’s work with Immigration and Customs Enforcement includes an effort to get “near real-time visibility” of migrants who might self-deport out of the country, according to Axios.
Morgan Chalfant contributed to this report.