From Palantir to Neocon Think Tanks, the Military Corporate Complex is Quietly Winning Donald Trump's Second Term

By playing to Trump's agenda while fighting White House oversight, deep state institutions have gained "unwarranted Influence" that threatens the Constitution.

This report originally appeared in Restoration of America News and is reprinted with permission.

Whether or not the future validates President Donald Trump's foreign policy, he is on track to be the second-term president most publicly committed to peace-through-strength since Ronald Reagan. This trend holds true not just in Azerbaijan and Armenia, in India and Pakistan, and the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda; but possibly in Ukraine and Russia, and even in the Middle East with a proposed expansion of the Abraham Accords. Still, what may be most notable about Trump's commitment is exactly what was most notable about Reagan's in his second term. Namely, a disjuncture between an executive publicly pushing for peace and Washington operators privately entrenching the military corporate complex that drives endless war.

Even more brazen is these military corporate operators' strategy for managing their aims. They are attempting to turn the Trump White House's promised populist focuses on strengthening the military against China, reforming universities with "anti-woke" policies, and ending the problem of illegal immigration to their own advantage. Cutting deals over national security and DEI while fighting tooth-and-nail to neuter antitrust enforcement is allowing them to maintain, and in some cases expand their power outside of public knowledge or accountability. These actions could set up a repeat, or worse, of the very deep state that conservative populism formed to fight against.     

The Historical Threat of Weapons Contractors

Since 1961, when President Dwight D. Eisenhower delivered his famous Farewell Address on the "military industrial complex," the concept of the weapons industry driving politics via government has been publicly available knowledge that has gone sorely under-analyzed. As Eisenhower put it, graphically, in the speech:

Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry . . . But now . . . we annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United State corporations . . . we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.

In his notes for the speech, drafted in October 1960, Eisenhower was more specific about how this "unwarranted influence" might work:

Flag and general officers retiring at an early age take positions in war based industrial complex shaping its decisions and guiding the direction of its tremendous thrust. This creates a danger that what the Communists have always said about us may become true. We must be very careful to insure that the 'merchants of death' do not come to dictate national policy.

It was precisely because of his experience leading the wars against Nazism and Sovietism that Eisenhower knew what he was talking about. He had commanded D-Day, a triumph of military bureaucracy; and approved anti-Soviet coups at the hands of the CIA, working hand-in-glove with elite lawyers and consultants. He had also, after his military service and before his presidency, led Columbia University as it grew flush with government funds for R&D against the Soviets. This academic post had allowed him to see the transformation of knowledge-producing institutions by military corporate needs: A situation in which "a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity" leading to the "domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money." 

What Eisenhower did not and could not have predicted is that the end of the Cold War at the hands of the Reagan Administration would not solve these problems of "merchants of death" capturing government and knowledge but instead make them worse.

How the Threat Worsened under Democrats and Neoconservatives After the Cold War

The first culprit was the Administration of Bill Clinton, who was put into office by financiers who saw the Cold War not as an unfortunate necessity but a template for a new pax Americana now that America had (in this view) the world to itself. Restoration News has recently reported on these players and their effects, in its investigations of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) and the "New Democrats" created by DLC funding. Many of the players surrounding the DLC's push, most notably the financier Michael Steinhardt as well as the national security official and future Secretary of State Antony Blinken, had connections to hawkish Republicans, known as "neoconservatives." Neoconservatives were the players who had publicly championed the "Reagan Revolution's" small government ethos in the 1980s while eroding its populist promise by setting up think tanks and taking jobs with weapons contractors followed by stints in the Pentagon to entrench the military corporate elite. In the model held by all of these players—Clinton "neoliberals" and post-Reagan "neoconservatives"—defense spending might go down in the short run, but the aim was to ensure its continuation. This is precisely what was accomplished by Clinton in his first two years in office.

In the name of cutting costs, Clinton's Administration applied the same model to Washington weapons contractors that it applied to Wall Street financiers. It pressured weapons contractors to begin merging, so that the fifty firms which dominated Washington in 1993 had become, by the end of the decade, five. Those eight "too-big-to-fail" financial firms which would come close to crashing the global economy in 2008 had their quieter counterpart in this Big Five, which have mostly managed to go unnoticed even as the effects of their conglomerations mount.

Clinton then spent his remaining years in office pursuing policies which kept these firms in clover: Interventions in Somalia and Bosnia and Kosovo; a permanent militarized presence in the Middle East; and a crime bill which created and then enriched a domestic industry of weapons (and then prisons) contractors by militarizing police forces at home. These commitments continued during the George W. Bush and Obama Administrations, benefiting the now- "Big Five" weapons contractors: Raytheon (now RTX), General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and Northrup Grumman. As Restoration News has reported several times this year, these five firms have seeded the Pentagon with lawyers and consultants which have aggrandized an administrative bureaucracy that has come to proportionally outnumber soldiers and which runs the place in the name of risk management. As Restoration News has also reported this year, they have increasingly funded the think tanks and the international schools, and contracted with the law firms and consultancies, which provide advice and staff to the Pentagon, the State Department, and the intelligence agencies.  

Finally, crucially, under the Clinton and George W. Bush and Obama Administrations Washington began funding new additions to the deep state: A handful of defense-tech firms from Silicon Valley (Amazon, Meta, Palantir, Microsoft, Geo Group). Many of these players' growth was seeded by government investments in the 1990s: Vice President Al Gore was Silicon Valley's special champion, to the point where gatherings of the beneficiaries of his influence during that decade were nicknamed "Gore-Techs." Today they are backed by financial firms like BlackRock and Vanguard which have also been in clover since the financial conglomeration of the Clinton era, as well as by new financial investment firms like Andreessen Horowitz.

Under Trump, the Deep State Receives Limited Yet Real Cuts

Restoration News has investigated how all of these players' co-option of the Pentagon led to sharp reductions in troop readiness and morale during the Biden Administration. In the first eight months of the new Trump Administration, there have been two shifts in this trend, the first positive and the second decidedly not.

First, on the positive side of the ledger: Think tanks, weapons contractors, law firms and consultancies are on the defensive. The Pentagon is cutting a limited but meaningful number of contracts and defense research grants: To Accenture, Booz Allen Hamilton, Deloitte, and other unnamed companies; and to universities like Columbia, Cornell, Princeton, and many others. These cuts have also led to the de facto shuttering of the Wilson Center, one of the premier staffers of the military corporate complex. And they have spurred a general rethinking at elite universities about the necessity of voluntarily reducing universities' role in Washington. What's more, when it comes to defense-tech contractors, the rising force from Silicon Valley, the Administration is actively looking to make bidding processes on Pentagon contracts more competitive so that a handful of powerful firms don't dominate the process. According to a Defense One report at the end of July:

The Defense Department's sequel to the $9 billion Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability contract it awarded in 2022 will target more than the four major hyperscale cloud service providers — Amazon Web Services, Google, Microsoft and Oracle — that won the first contract back in 2022 . . . Defense Department Chief Information Officer Katie Arrington said JWCC Next will "open the door" to smaller cloud service providers and non-traditional companies "that generally wouldn't be involved in the [DOD] and our world and trying to bring them in and figure out ways we can incorporate them."

"We are looking to expand the aperture," Arrington said. "Competition breeds innovation, competition breeds efficiency."

But Defense-Tech Rises…

But the second shift is not so positive: Namely, despite these efforts, all of these players are surviving intact, and some are becoming more powerful. There is, so far, no concerted White House effort of the kind urged by some Trump supporters: To break up or specifically defund weapons contractors or think tanks; or to meaningfully reduce the power of the elite law firms and consultancies which service them. 'In the past eight months the military corporate complex has been strengthened by the growth of the monopolists in the very defense-tech sector the Pentagon is trying to diversify. The Trump Administration's urgent and necessary priorities of ridding institutions of DEI, facilitating the end of unauthorized immigration, and confronting the challenge of China have given these new defense-tech monopolies an opportunity, and they have used it.  

In a recent report on Jeff Bezos, Restoration News investigated the "pivot" exercised by Silicon Valley monopolists Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg beginning in 2024. Both moved towards the political "center" in superficial ways (clothes, houses, branding) to appeal to the Trump Administration in the interest of expanding their defense contracts. This pivot has paid off. Whereas, in 2018, Zuckerberg and Bezos had to persuade the Pentagon to buy their services to compete with China, the necessities of great power competition has now made their services an easy sell. When it comes to deportation, the need for their services is even greater:

 The government has supplemented [records tracking unauthorized immigrants] with information it buys from data brokers, who provide extensive profiles on just about anyone's demographic, consumer, location, health, educational, insurance and financial data — whether it is data captured by your phone, your car, or your utility meter.

Particularly successful gaining government contracts for deportation these past eight months has been Geo Group, which:

…over the past decade . . . has also built a lucrative side business of digital tools—including ankle monitors, smart watches and tracking apps—to surveil immigrants on behalf of the federal government . . . Geo Group, which has about 18,000 employees . . . [has] no real competition . . . [and could] generate nearly $700 million in revenue cumulatively through 2026. Its biggest shareholders include BlackRock and Vanguard.

The ultimate case-in-point of this defense-tech monopolist expansion is the giant Palantir, which has triumphed by twisting to its own benefit the Trump Administration's three main issues: China, deportation, and opposing "wokeness."

…And Palantir Triumphs

Palantir was founded by Peter Thiel and Alex Karp off the proceeds of PayPal after 9/11, on the belief that if intelligence bureaucracies had better information from leaner private enterprises about the activities of suspicious-seeming individuals, such tragedies could be prevented in future. The CIA's investment arm, In-Q-Tel, provided funds for Palantir as well; and soon Palantir was contracting with the CIA, the FBI, and the NSA. As early as 2009, Karp said the following about Palantir's methods:

What we do is we use what legal scholars call predicate-based search. So we would look at you, and then we would go out and say, oh, there's lots of different things in your life that may be indicative of someone involved in bad behavior.

As critics have noted, this is a lot like the Stephen Spielberg movie (off the Philip K. Dick novella) Minority Report, where people are surveilled and eventually arrested for crimes they haven't yet committed. But it also proved extremely useful in solving real-world problems:

Palantir's FALCON software helped ICE collate and analyze vast amounts of data to map family connections and plan future raids. In 2018 ICE used FALCON to prepare for raids on around a hundred 7-Eleven stores across the US…. This April it emerged that ICE was paying the company $30 million to develop a software system, known as ImmigrationOS, to track immigrants using biometric and geolocation data. 

Palantir also stepped in to help the U.S. government when a revolt among Google's staff against the company providing software for a Pentagon AI warfare program led to Google backing out of the contract. Alex Karp has cast Palantir's willingness to stage interventions like these with Google and the government as parts of a stand against wokeness, which he sees as the cause of Google's willingness to listen to its employees' unwillingness to participate in making the products for AI warfare. He argues that this purported wokeness, "the speed and enthusiasm with which the culture skewers anyone for their perceived transgressions and errors," stops Silicon Valley companies from "participat[ing] in the defense of the nation" . . . ."—an error Palantir is there to remedy.

But concern over national security overreach isn't inherently "woke": Indeed, some of the "wokest" members of Congress have also been avid backers of deep state plays like the war in Ukraine. Concern over national security overreach is a constitutional concern. It runs straight from the American founders, who knew that a military corporate empire like Britain's in the 1770s could use its power to reduce its citizens to dependent subjects. The Founders put this insidious process down to London operators with deep corporatist connections who quietly and subtly turned government actions to the ends of their benefactors. And just as in London in the 1770s, so in Washington in the 2020s, where Palantir is amassing enormous power in the name of "anti-wokeness" and "the national interest" using quiet beneficiaries of its own:

In March Trump signed an executive order directing the government to share data across agencies, raising concerns . . . [of] " . . . a master list of personal information on Americans" . . . Palantir's selection as the main partner for this data-sharing project, the Times reported, was driven by Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), at least three members of which were known to have formerly worked at Palantir.

Karp is aware of his rising success. In a February call with investors, after Palantir's market value had risen past the Walt Disney Company's, he said the following:

We're doing it! . . . We are crushing it . . . We have dedicated our company to the service of the West, and to the United States of America . . . Palantir is here to disrupt and make the institutions we partner with the very best in the world, and, when it's necessary, to scare enemies and on occasion kill them.

The questions he didn't answer were these: Who is considered an enemy, and do American citizens count as targets, and who gets to decide?

The Gutting of Antitrust Ensures Defense-Tech Malfeasance…

In the Administration as President Trump constructed it in January, there was a stopgap to plays like these: Antitrust enforcement. Antitrust, supported vociferously by Trump's Vice President, J.D. Vance, helps ensure that defense-tech players like Palantir or Geo Group, or the "Big Five" weapons contractors, can't monopolize their product. It uses the government's power to stop these companies from growing too large: Making them responsive to market competition and public concerns even as the government relies on them for its most immediate defense-technology needs.

The most obvious proponent of antitrust enforcement was Gail Slater: The former J.D. Vance staffer and current head of the Antitrust division at the Department of Justice. Another proponent was Slater's deputy Roger Alford: A returnee from the First Trump Administration where he had served as "the top antitrust official for international affairs." But reports these past few months suggest a neutering of these officials at the hands of military corporate lobbyists.

In August, the Wall Street Journal reported that Slater was being inundated with lobbyists pushing against her antitrust policies. It also reported that Alford and another antitrust official had been "removed from their roles" in July "after clashing with senior officials at the agency who they accused of cutting deals with favored lobbyists." The clashes became especially heated over a proposed merger between the Silicon Valley tech giant Hewlett Packard Enterprises (HPE) and a smaller competitor.

After his firing, Alford, who is a law professor at Notre Dame (a conservative law school where Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett taught)

 called on a federal court in San Jose, Calif., that is overseeing the Justice Department's proposed resolution [to the HPE merger] to "examine the surprising truth of what happened." Federal courts have authority to look for any backroom dealings that could have influenced the settlement of a merger lawsuit. "I hope the court blocks the HPE…merger," Alford said…"If you knew what I knew, you would hope so too."

Specifically, Alford pointed to the actions of top Justice Department officials Chad Mizelle and Stanley Woodward, the former of whom he says "is prone to favoring outside lawyers and lobbyists with whom he is friends." Not surprisingly, Mizelle and Woodward are denizens of the Big Law milieu Restoration News reported on in April and May: Ex-partners at Gibson Dunn, Jones Day, and Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, the latter the second-largest lobbying law firm by revenue in America. Mizelle is also a past Acting General Counsel of the Department of Homeland Security.

This lack of any real check on Silicon Valley defense-tech players and their lobbying means that their influence will spread—and that it will come back to affect the very military corporate institutions the Trump Administration is paring down.

…and that Defense-Tech Influence will Spread

One example of this spread of defense-tech influence to other deep state institutions is Ivy league universities, which are increasingly incorporating the political philosophy of defense-tech spokespeople into their curricula.

The main vehicle for this incorporation is Curtis Yarvin: The philosopher-of-choice for Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, and other defense-tech power players. Yarvin calls himself a conservative, but he is definitively not a conservative of the constitutional populist variety. He opposes government bureaucracy by an insular elite, but he explicitly wants to replace this bureaucracy with a "privatized" military-corporate elite off the model of Singapore and China. (According to Yarvin, China and Russia's "'authoritarian' systems of government" are how they can "best compete with an enfeebled America" while Singapore's superiority is shown by the fact that newspapers can be "sold on the honor system with an open cash box," and "if you have never lived in an environment" like Singapore's, "of complete public peace, you don't know what you're missing.") In Yarvin's model, a military corporate elite should govern in the name of public order without political accountability through any constitutional mechanism.

This is about as far from the worldview Jefferson or Madison articulated in the Declaration or Constitution as can be imagined, but Yarvin has been welcomed by the beneficiaries of the military corporate complex as the right's "resident intellectual." His recent visit to Harvard, where he charmed students by urging them to take the democratic gloves off and govern as elites, came not long before a proposal inside Harvard to open an institute for conservative scholarship off the model of Stanford's Hoover Institution. This is not a promising sign. The Hoover Institution, with several noteworthy exceptions, is a haven for military interventionists (Condoleezza Rice is its president). What's more, the key movers apparently advising Harvard on the creation of a second Hoover are members of Harvard Business School, another incubator of the military corporate elite (George W. Bush and Mitt Romney are graduates.) This makes the proposed new institute sound like a center for the care and feeding of a Yarvin-like elite: students who will go on to work for Thiel and Karp.

Finally, relatedly, defense-tech influence has increased the influence of militarist think tanks: Not those used by Democrats to seed military corporate administrators, like RAND, but smaller players whose last period of influence was during the George W. Bush Administration, the height of neoconservatism. Prominent among these is the neoconservative Hudson Institute – which counts Karp as a friend and ally, and which has on its board of trustees or as a "distinguished fellow" both the chief technology officer and the head of defense at Palantir. Not coincidentally, the Hudson Institute is now making successful outreaches to White House officials based on a shared focus on counterterrorism policies.

Defense-Purchased Politicians: A New Wrinkle in an Old Trend

The situation seems to be setting up a repeat of the post-Reagan years: A meaningful attack on concentration of power followed by the restoration of authority by the deep state. But, as two coming Restoration News reports will reveal, a new wrinkle has been added: The presence of intelligence-bought Democratic politicians in electoral politics and of Republican ex-politicos in weapons and tech companies. It is these players of the uniparty, Left and Right, who look set to manage the perpetuation, and eventual return to unchallenged authority, of the deep state that the MAGA movement mobilized to curtail.