Palantir quietly lands in Education Department through foreign funding portal 

Palantir is expanding its reach into the Education Department, where the data analytics and software giant is helping develop the agency’s new portal for universities across the country to report foreign donations. 

The quiet move marks the technology company’s latest expansion into federal government work, particularly in data management services. 

An Education Department spokesperson confirmed Palantir was involved as a subcontractor for its revamped foreign funding portal, which is set to be rolled out early next month. 

The agency announced the portal project this week, but did not name the vendors behind it. The portal will serve as a central place for schools to disclose to the department any foreign-source gifts and contracts worth $250,000 or more, the agency said. 

Palantir is a subcontractor to Monkton, a northern Virginia-based computer and network security company, the spokesperson told FedScoop. According to federal spending records, the Education Department awarded a contract to Monkton in September that obligated $9.8 million for the design, development, and deployment of a “Section 117 Information Sharing Environment Capable of Providing Greater Transparency.” Palantir, however, is not publicly listed as a subcontractor on the project. 

Section 117 of the Higher Education Act requires schools to disclose foreign gifts and contracts over $250,000. 

The contract with Monkton could cost the agency up to $61.8 million, more than six times the cost of the modernization project for the ed.gov website, which was allocated $10 million in 2022. 

Speculation over the portal began after the agency’s Office of the Chief Information Officer registered a new federal domain, foreignfundinghighered.gov, which was discovered by a bot tracking new government domains. 

When FedScoop visited the link shortly before 10:30 a.m. ET on Thursday, the website showed a blocked network alert, which read, “The network connection you are using is not in your enrollment’s ingress allowlist. Please contact your enrollment administrator or Palantir representative.” 

Upon revisiting the page about an hour later, the website showed a login page with the Palantir logo.

And two hours after that, the Palantir logo was replaced with an Education Department logo. 

Neither Palantir nor Monkton immediately responded to requests for comment. 

Education joins a growing list of civilian agencies signalling interest in and doing business with Palantir, which offers the government extensive data integration and analytics capabilities. The company has long held defense contracts with the Pentagon, but has expanded in recent years to civilian agencies like Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 

The Education Department said earlier this week that the reporting portal has “not been meaningfully updated” since the first Trump administration. The agency argued that the Biden administration “did not make it a priority” to enforce Section 117 or to monitor potential foreign influence in American schools. 

President Donald Trump signed an executive order in April directing the Education secretary to take any actions to enforce the provision, including an order to provide Americans with “greater access to information” about foreign funding in higher education. 

Since returning to the White House, the Trump administration launched four Section 117 investigations due to “inaccurate and untimely foreign funding disclosures,” the department said.

Madison Alder contributed reporting.