Pentagon’s nascent BOND program informed Feinberg’s new ‘Funding Palantir’ memo
Deputy Defense Secretary Steve Feinberg’s new instruction for the Pentagon to provide nearly $244 million through March for undisclosed Palantir products was influenced by the Trump administration’s Business Operators for National Defense program, according to two sources who said it also illustrates the government’s plans to further fast-track the tech giant’s military offerings.
The somewhat vague, one-page memorandum — entitled “Funding Palantir” — was issued Aug. 4 and viewed by DefenseScoop on Wednesday.
“Palantir is providing valuable support to improve efficiencies with the defense industrial base,” Feinberg wrote. “Their efforts are improving Department of War and prime contractor understanding of delays in production and maintenance of critical munitions and delivery vehicles, which are already resulting in process improvements.”
Officially changing the Defense Department’s name requires an act of Congress, but President Donald Trump rebranded DOD as the Department of War last year.
In the memo that surfaced this week, Feinberg directed the under secretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment and the Pentagon comptroller to “fund up to $243.9M for Palantir services through March 31, 2027” and to “work with the Military Departments to identify funding options for the period April 1, 2027 through December 31, 2028, as needed.”
The deputy secretary did not indicate what specific Palantir products and services this fresh funding would enable and advance, or identify which pools of money across the agency the investments would flow from.
Co-founded by billionaire Peter Thiel, a prominent conservative donor and long-time Donald Trump ally, Palantir maintains deep ideological and personnel ties to the president’s second administration.
The corporation builds and supplies AI-powered fusion and analytics software that helps the government and military capture, integrate, and apply massive, ever-growing volumes of data.
Much information about Palantir’s pricing and work with the U.S. military is said to be classified. However, its footprint has been aggressively expanding across the DOD and the joint force in recent years.
Scrutiny has simultaneously been mounting over associated contracting activities and the oversight of its technology deployments in real-world warfare.
Some of the company’s key lines of effort for the Pentagon include: the Maven Smart System (MSS), which grew out of DOD’s flagship Project Maven and is increasingly the backbone of the military’s vision for next-generation command and control; Palantir Gotham capabilities for autonomous tasking and threat detection; enterprise software agreements with military services; its Warp Speed manufacturing operating system; and the Maven-style ShipOS platform that’s designed for shipbuilding modernization.
The Pentagon’s budget materials for fiscal 2027 include a request for more than $1.5 billion to expand defense users’ access to Palantir’s MSS in support of the DOD’s emerging “Joint Force AI-Enabled Headquarters initiative” and $60 million for the little-known “Virtual Joint Operations Center (VJOC) initiative.”
On Thursday, a source who requested to be referred to as a “War Department official” did not directly answer DefenseScoop’s questions about the DOD’s intended purchases and funding sources that underpin Feinberg’s new Palantir memo.
“This planning directive is standard practice and reflects our broader operational-level engagements hosted by Business Operators for National Defense,” they said.
Launched by Pentagon leaders in February, the BOND program was designed to embed select U.S. private-sector executives into the U.S. military’s procurement pipelines to inform new approaches that resolve bureaucratic roadblocks and accelerate weapons development and deliveries.
“The department routinely issues similar funding and planning memos across a wide range of our industry partners to address procurement modernization and scaling,” the official also told DefenseScoop. “This is not exclusive to any single vendor — instead, it is a deliberate approach to connect defense industry leaders with the Department of War to accelerate production timelines.”
They declined to provide examples of contractors besides Palantir that BOND has influenced similar planning directives for, or to clarify what company-provided assets the additional funding will cover.
An official named David Alfonso announced in a LinkedIn post on Wednesday that he was appointed to serve as DOD’s deputy director for BOND — reporting to director George Kollitides of the Economic Defense Unit, which Feinberg established earlier this year.
Palantir spokespersons did not respond to DefenseScoop’s request for comment.
