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National security think tanks have long been funded by old-guard contractors like Lockheed Martin and Raytheon. In recent years, the Trump-tied software and data analytics firm Palantir, which is competing with those legacy contractors for federal weapons programs, has been getting in on the game.
In the first half of this year, Palantir gave nearly $1.7 million to the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation & Institute, according to a disclosure it filed last week with the House. The sum of the donations, made in March, is on par with what the firm gave to the nonprofit in 2023 and 2024. Palantir appears to have given far more to the Reagan Foundation—where its co-founder Joe Lonsdale is on the board of trustees, alongside figures from the Republican Party establishment—than to other defense think tanks that shape national security planning and populate the revolving door between the Pentagon and weapons companies.
Under the Trump administration, Palantir is getting a boom in government contracts, which are the company’s largest source of revenue. The Silicon Valley-style defense company, tapped in recent months to expand its technology work with federal agencies like the Department of Defense, has been cheering its rising profits in earnings calls. In May, the Army boosted Palantir’s contract for Project Maven, an A.I.-powered targeting system, to a total of $1.3 billion. The firm’s CEO Alex Karp crowed “Palantir is on fire” on a first-quarter earnings call, and its stock price just hit a record high.