Palantir, Fearing Congressional Subpoenas, Hires a Former Democratic Senator to Make Everyone Feel Better

Who Palantir Hired

The new hire is Jon Tester, a Democrat who spent 18 years representing Montana in the Senate before losing his seat in 2024. He is also, as NPR puts it, a colorful organic farmer, which is not the usual résumé for a surveillance-contractor adviser.

Tester was explicit about the limits of the job in an interview. "My agreement with Palantir is advisory in nature, it is not lobbying," he said. He added that he will focus on the government-services side of Palantir's business.

He was also candid about why a company like Palantir wants someone like him. "Perception is reality in Washington, D.C. and in politics in general," Tester said. "But the fact is, I think Palantir has got a good story to tell, and they need to tell it. And hopefully folks will be receptive to it."

A Wave of Hires Ahead of January

Palantir is not alone. Tech companies expect a wave of scrutiny from Democrats over the industry's ties to the Trump administration once the party takes over Congress in January, and many are responding by hiring former Democratic lawmakers and aides to make their case to the incoming House and Senate majorities.

Aya Ibrahim, a senior fellow at the AI Now Institute and a former State Department official, said it is no coincidence. "I think at the end of the day, these companies have an inordinate amount of money and they will try and put it wherever they can in order to stave off any real accountability," she said.

Tester, for his part, called the midterm results a blue "tidal wave" after two years of a Congress that gave him "great disappointment." He predicted the new Congress will change policy. "I don't think you're going to see the kind of aggressive tactics that were taken forth by ICE moving forward," he said.

The Questions Waiting for Palantir

Palantir, named by billionaire co-founder Peter Thiel after the "seeing stone" in The Lord of the Rings, has been accused of abetting mass surveillance of Americans and immigrants. The company denies it. It says it doesn't gather or manipulate data at all, and that it builds tools for government agencies and private companies to organize and optimize their own information. It has also said it is committed to "protecting privacy and upholding liberal democratic values."

Congress has already pressed the point. Earlier this year, while still in the minority, Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon and 30 other Democratic lawmakers demanded answers about Palantir's contracts with the Department of Homeland Security and whether its tools feed federal efforts to surveil Americans. Palantir replied that it is "neither conducting nor enabling mass surveillance of American citizens." Wyden's office says he wasn't fully satisfied.

His staff wrote in a statement that Wyden "has a number of questions about Palantir's work to facilitate the Trump-Vance abuse of government data that he intends to ask again as chairman of the Finance Committee." The statement ended with a warning: "If Palantir is not responsive next year, compulsory processes will be on the table."

How Big Palantir Has Gotten

The stakes are large because the company is. Palantir is valued at more than $350 billion and, according to government records, holds about $2 billion in federal contracts. Most of it is with the Departments of Defense, Homeland Security and State, though it also works with Agriculture, Veterans Affairs and Health and Human Services.

Last year, more than a dozen former Palantir employees criticized the company over its $30 million contract with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to build a tool giving "near real-time visibility" into the movement of migrants. They argued it violated the company's own code of conduct. ICE also shared Medicaid data it wasn't supposed to have with Palantir, according to NPR reporting. We have covered how the company made $1.94 billion helping the administration deport people and how ICE loaded protest-observer dossiers into Palantir's database.

Tester's Patriot Act Record

The hire is awkward for a reason Tester himself raised. During his 18 years in the Senate he was an outspoken critic of the Patriot Act, which expanded the Justice Department's surveillance powers after 9/11. Asked whether his concerns about government surveillance remain, and whether they apply to his new employer.

Tester said Palantir is different, and that it doesn't build "big databases" or trade in private data. "I wanted to do away with the Patriot Act because it was about privacy," he said. "It was about making sure that I am not being watched by anybody, including Big Brother. And by the way, I've talked to many people within Palantir. They believe the same way I do. This is an organization that believes in privacy."

Palantir's CEO and co-founder, Alex Karp, a self-described liberal, has been sharply critical of Democrats during Trump's second term on issues like immigration and AI. In a 2025 interview with Axios, he told "my Democratic friends" to "grow a spine," adding that "a lot of these people actually agree with me in private."