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A new analysis finds that tech giant Palantir Technologies paid $0 in federal income taxes last year, despite raking in hundreds of millions in taxpayer money to build out a mass network to surveil Americans in partnership with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
Palantir, which has landed multiple massive contracts under the Trump administration, made $1.6 billion in net income last year.
It grew so much last year that it joined the list of the 20 most valuable U.S. companies, with its stock more than doubling in value in the first half of 2025 alone. In a report to shareholders, the company said it was “crushing” expectations in terms of growth, with revenue growing 93 percent year over year at the end of 2025.
Despite this growth, it did not pay any federal income taxes in 2025 due to tax policies allowing corporations to effectively dodge taxes, according to an analysis released this week by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP). The practice has been present for years, but was worsened this year due to the combination of GOP tax breaks passed in last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act and the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, the group found.
Because of this, Palantir was one of at least 88 major profitable U.S. companies that avoided paying any federal income tax in 2025, ITEP found.
This includes companies like Tesla, owned by Elon Musk, who spent the first half of 2025 ravaging critical U.S. welfare, public health, humanitarian aid, and research programs, under the Trump administration’s “Department of Government Efficiency.”
Other major companies also owed $0 or even got money back in the form of tax rebates, including ticketing company Live Nation Entertainment; airlines like Southwest and United; other military contractors like Honeywell; utility companies like American Electric Power, Dominion Energy, and Duke Energy; entertainment companies like Walt Disney; and many more.
Together, these companies enjoyed over $105 billion in pre-tax income. If this were taxed at the statutory corporate tax rate of 21 percent, the companies would have paid $22 billion in taxes, ITEP found.
“What we’re seeing in this most recent year is corporate tax avoidance on steroids,” said report co-author Matt Gardner, a senior fellow at ITEP.
Palantir was able to dodge federal income taxes despite being the recipient of massive federal outlays.
“Palantir has been rewarded significantly through the second Trump term. On one end, the company’s domestic revenues surged in 2025, yet it paid zero federal income taxes,” said Spandan Marasini, a co-author of the report and ITEP data analyst, in a statement to Truthout. “Through the corporate giveaways in the most recent tax bill, the administration has made clear that being profitable is no longer sufficient reason to contribute to the public treasury.”
From Donald Trump’s inauguration to May of last year, it received $113 million in federal government funding, in a mix of existing and new contracts, reporting found. This funding just scratches the surface, however, with the Pentagon awarding Palantir a contract ceiling boost of $795 million in May — then, later in the year, a contract worth up to $10 billion that allows the Department of Defense wide latitude to purchase services from the company like its AI military system, Maven.
The company was tapped by the Trump administration to build a network to massively expand the federal government’s knowledge on Americans, allowing the government to consolidate information across agencies and granting federal officials “untold surveillance power,” as The New York Times reported last May.
This partnership is just one part of Palantir’s prolific role in Trump’s fascist anti-immigrant campaigns and targeting of protesters across the U.S.
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