Since final March, the Division of Well being and Human Companies has been utilizing AI instruments from Palantir to display and audit grants, grant functions, and job descriptions for noncompliance with President Donald Trump’s govt orders concentrating on “gender ideology” and something associated to range, fairness, and inclusion (DEI), in keeping with a just lately revealed stock of all use instances HHS had for AI in 2025.
Neither Palantir nor HHS has publicly introduced that the corporate’s software program was getting used for these functions. Through the first yr of Trump’s second time period, Palantir earned greater than $35 million in funds and obligations from HHS alone. Not one of the descriptions for these transactions point out this work concentrating on DEI or “gender ideology.”
The audits have been going down inside HHS’s Administration for Kids and Households (ACF), which funds household and baby welfare and oversees the foster and adoption techniques. Palantir is the only contractor charged with making a listing of “place descriptions that will must be adjusted for alignment with current govt orders.”
Along with Palantir, the startup Credal AI—which was based by two Palantir alumni—helped ACF audit “current grants and new grant functions.” The “AI-based” grant evaluate course of, the stock says, “evaluations utility submission recordsdata and generates preliminary flags and priorities for dialogue.” All related data is then routed to the ACF Program Workplace for ultimate evaluate.
ACF staffers finally evaluate any job descriptions, grants, and grant functions which might be flagged by AI throughout a “ultimate evaluate” stage, in keeping with the stock. It additionally says that these specific AI use instances are presently “deployed” inside ACF, which means that they’re actively getting used on the company.
Final yr, ACF paid Credal AI about $750,000 to offer the corporate’s “Tech Enterprise Generative Synthetic Intelligence (GenAI) Platform,” however the cost descriptions within the Federal Register don’t point out DEI or “gender ideology.”
HHS, ACF, Palantir, and Credal AI didn’t return WIRED’s requests for remark.
The chief orders—Govt Order 14151, “Ending Radical and Wasteful Authorities DEI Packages and Preferencing,” and Govt Order 14168, “Defending Girls From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Organic Fact to the Federal Authorities”—have been each issued on Trump’s first day in workplace final yr.
The primary of those orders calls for an finish to any insurance policies, packages, contracts, grants that point out or concern DEIA, DEI, “fairness,” or “environmental justice,” and expenses the Workplace of Administration and Funds, the Workplace of Personnel Administration, and the lawyer normal with main these efforts.
The second order calls for that every one “interpretation of and utility” of federal legal guidelines and insurance policies outline “intercourse” as an “immutable organic classification” and outline the one genders as “male” and “feminine.” It deems “gender ideology” and “gender identification” to be “false” and “disconnected from organic actuality.” It additionally says that no federal funds can be utilized “to advertise gender ideology.”
“Every company shall assess grant situations and grantee preferences and guarantee grant funds don’t promote gender ideology,” it reads.
The implications of Govt Order 14151, concentrating on DEI, and Govt Order 14168, concentrating on “gender ideology,” have been felt deeply all through the nation over the previous yr.
Early final yr, the Nationwide Science Basis began to flag any analysis that contained phrases related to DEI—together with comparatively normal phrases, like “feminine,” “inclusion,” “systemic,” or “underrepresented”—and place it below official evaluate. The Facilities for Illness Management and Prevention started retracting or pausing analysis that talked about phrases like “LGBT,” “transsexual,” or “nonbinary,” and stopped processing any knowledge associated to transgender folks. Final July, the Substance Abuse and Psychological Well being Companies Administration eliminated an LGBTQ youth service line supplied by the 988 Suicide & Disaster Lifeline.
