What does Palantir do and why is the federal government increasingly relying on it?

From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech.

I'm Novosafo.

Palantir makes software, which looks for patterns in data.

Various federal agencies have relied on it for years.

But the contracts are growing in number, just as the Trump administration is reportedly

trying to construct a centralized database combining info from various agencies.

That's brought Palantir renewed scrutiny, and Joseph Cox

has been following all of this at the Tech News site 404 Media. Palantir is a data analysis

company. It doesn't generate data, it doesn't collect any data. It bridges and marries different

data sets and pieces of information. So, for example, they've

done this in Afghanistan, when they had all of this stuff about IEDs, they brought that together,

they allowed the military to better understand how to combat that threat. Here, it's much more

about bringing all of this data together, which is ordinarily separated across

different government agencies, but now it's going to bring it into one place and re-contextualize

that data. And that's essentially what Palantir does. It makes these bridges between data

that didn't exist there to begin with. Now, if we are to believe the various reports and also House Committee letter from the

oversight committee that cites whistleblowers, that there's two things going on here.

There's an internal effort inside the Trump administration, potentially led by Doge, it looks like,

to merge data from various agencies into some kind of

collective understanding or a way of understanding all this information. And then there's this

effort to use Palantir software to aid in that. Why Palantir software and what is the potential

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