Palantir, the Donald Trump–connected spy-tech and AI firm, just scored a no-bid government contract potentially worth millions to help the Agriculture Department implement the White House’s divisive return-to-office directive. Under the guise of national security, the highly “sensitive” tasks to be handled by the billion-dollar tech behemoth will include “employee seat assignments” and “space utilization.”

Despite vague contract details, the project could potentially bring a workforce surveillance technology known as bossware to the federal workforce, despite concerns about its mental and physical toll on workers and its potential for errors and discrimination.

“In light of the Trump administration’s war on public-service workers, there’s reason to fear this Palantir ‘return-to-office tool’ will be deployed to further surveil and intimidate the remaining federal workforce,” said Paul Sonn, state policy program director at the National Employment Law Project, a workers’ rights advocacy nonprofit.

Palantir was among the donors funding the building of the new White House ballroom, a project that Trump is personally overseeing. In December 2024, Alex Karp, Palantir’s CEO, donated $1 million to MAGA Inc., a pro-Trump super PAC.

Peter Thiel, cofounder of Palantir, is a Trump ally and a longtime Republican donor. Thiel also groomed Vice President J. D. Vance and helped jump-start his political career by dumping millions into Vance’s campaign coffers for his 2022 Ohio Senate race.

Palantir did not respond to a request for comment, nor did the Department of Agriculture.

The new award is the latest purchase in a larger $300 million contract that the Agriculture Department and Palantir inked last year as part of a sweeping “national farm security” directive with the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security. The $300 million contract will allow Palantir “to conduct key security checks and expedite benefits processing for eligible applicants,” among other actions. The company has two other existing contracts with the Department of Agriculture, signed before President Trump’s second term.

This large outlay of funds to a private contractor comes at a time when the Trump administration has proposed sweeping cuts to food, housing, education, and low-income services. The Department of Agriculture has been downsizing its federal workforce as part of the Trump administration’s purported aim to cut costs. Since Trump took office in January 2025, the Department of Agriculture has lost twenty-seven thousand employees, a 27 percent reduction in its workforce since September 2024.

Amid these federal cuts, Palantir has been scooping up multiple federal contracts for a variety of services, including artificial intelligence, data analysis, and weapons. In July, the company inked a record-setting $10 billion, ten-year contract with the US Army.

One of the early policies enacted by the Trump administration to slash the federal workforce was a mandatory return-to-office policy enacted in the hopes of forcing employees who had been working remotely since the COVID-19 pandemic to either quit or opt for the “fork in the road” buyout program.

Now Palantir has been tapped by the Agriculture Department to monitor federal workers and regulatory compliance with Trump’s directives and other matters.

The return-to-office contract describes a range of potential applications for the surveillance company’s data analytics tools focused on efficiency, compliance, and security. Tasks include “real-time analytics to optimize space utilization and employee seat assignments” and “efficient decision-making.” Other responsibilities describe “continuous compliance monitoring” for “regulatory compliance officers and other personnel upon detection of threats or anomalies.”

The government sought no other bids for the project. The contract claims that only Palantir’s “mission-critical” operations would be able to deliver these services “in a matter of days, not years” and without “unacceptable delays.”

The exact cost of the project hasn’t been publicly posted yet. There are no official signatures on the procurement records indicating the amount of funding the project will receive, which could range from less than $750,000 to more than $75 million.

While the contract lacks specific details, the project appears to parallel AI-driven private-sector surveillance tech designed to monitor and boost employee efficiency. One of those applications is called bossware, a spyware tool installed on employees’ computers that surveils their activities, including tracking keystrokes to ensure worker productivity.

According to the National Employment Law Project, this kind of technology has been linked to “poor working conditions. . ., exploitative pay, unfair scheduling practices, barriers to accessing benefits, discrimination, inequity, and suppression of worker collective action.”

These workforce surveillance tools have seen a boom since the companies began implementing return-to-office policies.

The contract for a return-to-office tool was mandated in an earlier no-bid Agriculture Department contract awarded to Palantir called the National Farm Security Action Plan. That master contract required the implementation of numerous other data analytics and security protocols. Last year the Agriculture Department awarded a small, tribally owned company $4 million to implement “Palantir’s Return to Office Tool.” The exact specifics of the contract are unknown, but the deal was awarded in May of 2025 and expired in September.