Neither Palantir nor HHS have publicly announced that the company’s software is 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. There is no mention of this work targeting DEI or “gender ideology” in any description of these transactions.
The audits are taking place within HHS’s Administration for Children and Families (ACF), which funds family and child welfare and oversees the foster care and adoption systems. Palantir is the only contractor charged with creating “a list of position statements that may need to be adjusted for alignment with recent executive orders.”
In addition to Palantir, startup Cradle AI – founded by two Palantir alumni – helped ACF audit “existing grants and new grant applications.” The “AI-based” grant review process, the listing says, “reviews application submission files and generates initial flags and priorities for discussion.” All relevant information is then sent to the ACF Program Office for final review.
According to the inventory, ACF staff ultimately review any job descriptions, grants, and grant applications that are flagged by AI during the “final review” stage. It also says that these particular AI use cases are currently “deployed” within the ACF, meaning they are being actively used at the agency.
Last year, ACF paid Cradle AI approximately $750,000 to provide the company’s “tech enterprise generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) platform,” but the payment description in the Federal Register does not mention DEI or “gender ideology.”
HHS, ACF, Palantir and Cradle AI did not respond to WIRED’s requests for comment.
The executive orders – Executive Order 14151, “Ending radical and wasteful government DEI programs and preferences,” and Executive Order 14168, “Protecting 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 seeks to eliminate any policy, program, contract, grant that mentions or concerns 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 and application” of federal laws and policies define “sex” as an “immutable biological classification” and define gender only as “male” and “female”. It considers “gender ideology” and “gender identity” to be “false” and “detached from biological reality”. It also states that no federal funds can be used “to promote gender ideology.”
It reads, “Each agency will assess grant conditions and the priorities of grant recipients and ensure that grant funds do not promote gender ideology.”
The consequences of Executive Order 14151, targeting DEI, and Executive Order 14168, targeting “gender ideology,” have been deeply felt across the country over the past year.
Early last year, the National Science Foundation began flagging any research that contained words associated with DEI — including relatively common words like “women,” “inclusion,” “systemic,” or “underrepresented” — and put it under official review. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention began retracting or halting research that mentioned terms such as “LGBT,” “transsexual,” or “nonbinary” and stopped processing any data related to transgender people. Last July, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration removed the LGBTQ youth service line offered by 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.
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