Palant, the software company co-founded by Peter Thiel, is part of an effort by the Elon Musk’s so-called department of efficiency (DOGE) to build a new “mega API” to access the internal files of the income service, Sources from IRS in Wired.
In the past three days, Doge and a handful of Palantant representatives, as well as dozens of career engineers in career, have collaborated to build a single API layer above all IRS databases at a previously characterized event as a “hackathon”, said Wired. Palants representatives were on site during the event this week, a source with direct knowledge tells Wired.
APIs are application programming interfaces, which allow different applications to exchange data and could be used to move the IRS data to the cloud and access it. DOGE has expressed interest in the API project, possibly affecting all IRS data, which includes names, taxpayers’ addresses, social security numbers, income declarations and employment data. The API IRS layer could also allow someone to compare IRS data with interoperable data sets from other agencies.
If this project is going at the end, DOGE wants the Palant’s foundry software to become the “reading center of all IRS systems”, a source with direct knowledge indicates to Wired, which means that anyone who has access could see and have the possibility of possibly modifying all IRS data in one place. It is currently not clear that would have access to this system.
Foundry is a Palantir platform that can organize, create applications or run AI models on underlying data. Once the data is organized and structured, the “ontology” layer of the foundry can generate APIs for faster connections and automatic learning models. This would allow users to quickly question the software using artificial intelligence to sort the agency data, which would require that the AI system has access to this sensitive information.
The engineers responsible for completing the API project are convinced that they can finish it in 30 days, a source with direct knowledge indicates Wired.
Palantir did billion in government contracts. The company develops and maintains a variety of software tools for businesses and the government, including Foundry and Gotham, a data analysis tool mainly used for defense and intelligence. The CEO of Palantir, Alex Karp, recently referred to the “disturbance” of DOGE cost reduction initiatives and said: “Everything that is good for America will be good for Americans and very good for Palant.” The former Palantir workers have also taken control of the key roles of the computer government and Doge in recent months.
Wired was the first to point out that the IRS DOGE team organized a “hackathon” in Washington, DC, this week to launch the API project. The event started on Tuesday morning and ended on Thursday afternoon. A source in the room this week explained that the event was “very unstructured”. On Tuesday, engineers wandered in the room to discuss how to reach Doge’s goal.
The Treasury Department did not respond to a request for comments confirming the role of palantant in the project.
“The Treasury Department is happy to have gathered a team of long-standing engineers from the IRS who have been identified as the most talented technical staff. Thanks to this coalition, they will rationalize IRS systems to create the most effective service for the American taxpayer,” said Wired, a Treasury spokesperson. “This week, the team has participated in the kick -off of the IRS road card, a seminar of various strategy sessions, because they work with diligence to create effective systems. This new leadership and the new direction will maximize their capacities and serve as an active force multiplier whose IRS has needed for decades.”
