Construction continues on a new helipad on the South Lawn of the White House and the East Wing ballroom on August 6, 2026 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Kevin Carter/Getty Images)
“The president has no… constitutionally assigned authority over that property.”
A federal court on Friday ruled that President Donald Trump must halt most construction of his $400 million White House ballroom project, siding with a lower court that said it must be authorized by Congress.
“Each president is a temporary tenant, not the owner, of the White House and its executive residence,” wrote judges Patricia Millett and Bradley Garcia in a 2-1 decision for the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. “The president has no—and claims no—constitutionally assigned authority over that property.”
Friday’s ruling only affects the above-ground portions of the project. The construction of a fortified underground bunker and other “national security facilities” beneath the site is allowed to continue.
Trump has already demolished the East Wing of the White House to make room for the project, which he has said will be entirely privately funded, mostly by corporate donors, many of whom had business before the executive branch. However, reporting from The Washington Post in June revealed that he had secretly planned to dip into $300 million worth of taxpayer dollars for the project.
At Trump’s urging, Republicans have attempted to add $1 billion in taxpayer money to the federal budget to pay for the project’s security features, but the proposal to pass it through budget reconciliation without approval from Democrats was rejected by the Senate parliamentarian.
The court’s majority said it’s ruling “has nothing at all to do with whether the proposed ballroom is desirable, or not, as a matter of policy… What it does mean is that the defendants may not do so during the district court’s expeditious litigation without securing Congress’s authorization, as the Constitution and laws require.”
"Each President is a temporary tenant, not the owner, of the White House and its Executive Residence. The President has no—and claims no—constitutionally assigned authority over that property"
In sweeping, 136-page ruling, DC appeals court blocks construction of Trump ballroom pic.twitter.com/cNST4NtDql
Brent Leggs, the CEO of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which sued to block the ballroom’s construction in December, said Friday was “a great day for our country and for the American people’s right to voice their opinions about the historic places they cherish, including the White House.”
“The White House, a global landmark that symbolizes American identity and the ideals of democracy, belongs to the American people,” he said.
Trump reacted with predictable fury on Truth Social.
“We will be immediately appealing to the United StatesSupreme Court,” he wrote. “The Military and Secret Service are viewing this horrendous, politically motivated, and unlawful ruling as a National Security threat to our Nation in that the entire Complex is being built for the protection of our Country and, additionally, all future Presidents.”
The ruling is the second blow to one of Trump’s vanity projects this week. A report by the National Park Service recently found that his planned “Arc de Trump” near the National Mall could compromise the historical significance and “integrity” of dozens of other historic landmarks.
Donald Trump sings and dances, says that it’s fun to kill everyone … unless he gets distracted or falls asleep.Orcas discuss Donald Trump and the killer apes’ concept of democracy. Front Orca warns that Trump is crashing his country’s economy and that everything he does he does for the fantastically wealthy.Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk prepares to give $1,000,000 to a Wisconsin voter during a town hall meeting on March 30, 2025 in Green Bay, Wisconsin. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)
DOGE was a “slapdash and deceptive effort” that only succeeded in “putting Americans’ sensitive data at risk and hollowing out critical agencies,” said US Sen. Gary Peters.
A report from the Government Accountability Office released Thursday details how Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency wildly exaggerated the savings it was able to deliver for the US federal government.
The report, requested by Sens. Gary Peters (D-Mich.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), finds that DOGE used a number of tricks to inflate the value of its purported savings, including taking credit for ending leases that were already in the process of being terminated and falsely claiming to have canceled contracts that were left intact.
The report also finds that DOGE “did not provide sufficient information to verify the method used to calculate 96%” of savings purportedly achieved through grant cancellations.
And in cases where DOGE actually was responsible for terminating a contract or cancelling a lease, the report notes that it “did not consistently use its stated methodology for calculating savings or disclose limitations in a sufficient manner.”
Even in instances where the department followed its stated methodology, the report adds, “it did not account for many complexities and nuances of federal contracting,” such as obligations or settlement costs that may have come from ending a contract.
In touting the GAO report, Peters said it exposed DOGE as a “slapdash and deceptive effort” at streamlining government spending that only succeeded in “putting Americans’ sensitive data at risk and hollowing out critical agencies.”
Blumenthal accused the Trump administration of using DOGE as cover to “recklessly slash government programs, ransacking critical services and resources and proudly displaying supposed ‘savings.’”
Jessica Tillipman, associate dean for government procurement law at the George Washington University Law School, highlighted a number of DOGE flubs in a social media post breaking down the GAO report, including a “favorite example” of DOGE claiming $28 million in savings related to an Air Force contract that in reality only saved around $600,000.
Eric Boehm, writer for libertarian magazine Reason, said that the GAO report revealed that the savings Musk and his minions claimed from their work was “mostly just made up.”
In his assessment, Blumenthal said the report only “underscores the need for increased transparency and accountability from the Trump administration so the American public can better understand DOGE’s activities as the organization guts vital government programs.”
Orcas discuss Donald Trump and the killer apes’ concept of democracy. Front Orca warns that Trump is crashing his country’s economy and that everything he does he does for the fantastically wealthy.Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.
Palantir Technologies CEO Alex Karp speaks during the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland on January 20, 2026. (Photo by Fabrice Coffrini/AFP via Getty Images)
“The likes of Palantir need to stump up what’s due,” said one expert. “Tech giants raking off billions in profit can’t be free to pay what they please.”
Palantir Technologies, one of the world’s most influential—and controversial—surveillance tech companies, enjoyed an effective tax rate of just 1.4% globally last year while paying no US federal income tax despite recording substantial profits, an analysis released on Wednesday revealed.
The study,Who Pays for the Surveillance State?, was written by the Center for International Corporate Tax Accountability and Research (CICTAR) in partnership with the European Federation of Public Services Unions. The report “examines how Palantir is capturing ever-larger government contracts while paying no US federal corporate income tax and shifting much of its foreign profits back to the US, avoiding taxes in Europe.”
“In 2025 the company reported $1.657 billion in pre-tax profit, booked $22.7 million [in] corporate tax paid globally, and paid $0 in US federal income tax, resulting in an effective tax rate of just 1.4% globally,” CICTAR found.
“The report’s core claim of profit-shifting is based on the gap between revenue and profit location: 26% of Palantir’s revenue came from outside the US, but 96% of pre-tax profit was booked in the US,” the analysis states.
“The Trump administration has not only been granting record amounts in new contracts to Palantir but is running a global protection racket to help it—along with larger US tech giants—avoid paying tax both in the US and globally,” the report contends.
“In Europe, the report finds a pattern of subsidiaries providing services to the US parent on cost-plus terms, leaving low taxable margins locally while related-party payments move value back to the US,” CICTAR added.
Palantir maintains that it complies with applicable tax laws in every jurisdiction where it operates. Company representatives have said that transfer pricing arrangements and other accounting practices cited by critics are standard among multinational corporations and comply with existing regulations.
The Palo Alto, California-based company’s soaring revenues are partly driven by government contracts, with the US Department of Defense being the data analytics specialist’s biggest client. Palantir is also integral to the Trump administration’s deadly anti-immigrant crackdown, selling technology used by Department of Homeland Security agencies—including Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)—to identify, track, and target people for arrest and deportation and manage their cases.
Palantir has also drawn scrutiny from Democratic US lawmakers, including Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon and New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who demanded answers following reporting last year that the company was “amassing troves of data on Americans to create a government-wide, searchable ‘mega-database’ containing the sensitive taxpayer data of American citizens.”
Palestine defenders have also denounced Palantir and other tech giants for selling technology to the Israeli government and military despite findings by rights groups, scholars, national governments, and a United Nations commission of inquiry that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.
Alex Karp, the billionaire co-founder and CEO of Palantir, told CNBC last month: “I am the most publicly supportive CEO of Israel. I think Israel is on the side of good.”
In Europe, advocacy groups have raised concerns about Palantir’s contracts involving sensitive medical records, immigration systems, and predictive analytics. Campaigners argue that centralized data platforms create attractive targets for misuse, unauthorized access, or mission creep beyond their original purposes.
CICTAR’s report concludes that “European public authorities should be able to exclude companies that take public money while shifting profits away from the national tax base that funds public services, and provide the basis for national security that Palantir claims to defend.”
Responding to the report, Andrea Egan, general secretary of UNISON, the largest trade union in the United Kingdom, said that “a big multinational aggressively avoiding tax and dodging its responsibility to pay a fair share is probably no surprise. But the fact the UK and other countries are rewarding Palantir with massive government contracts is what beggars belief.”
“Systems that enable tax to be shirked on an industrial scale clearly have to change,” she added. “The likes of Palantir need to stump up what’s due. Tech giants raking off billions in profit can’t be free to pay what they please. Ministers shouldn’t award contracts to run public services to firms that are starving them of cash.”
Orcas discuss Donald Trump and the killer apes’ concept of democracy. Front Orca warns that Trump is crashing his country’s economy and that everything he does he does for the fantastically wealthy.Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.
Palantir’s UK CEO Louis Mosley says the company uses “a standard tax incentive” to minimise corporate tax. But the UK is one of the few countries that allows for this.
In May 2003, a standing committee of the House of Commons assembled to discuss and debate a mammoth Finance Bill.
“I am a tough chairman,” Nicholas Winterton, then a Conservative MP, declared at the first sitting, “and this will be an ordered, constructive and positive committee.” Mobile phones would be switched off, while members were permitted to remove their jackets at their discretion, provided they “are hung tidily on the rear of chairs.”
Stuffed into MPs’ red boxes that day was a provision that, over the next two decades, would allow Big Tech to reap billions of pounds in corporate tax deductions in the UK. Tony Blair’s government wanted to allow a company issuing stock to its employees as part of a compensation package to claim a tax relief equivalent to the difference between the market value of the stock and the original price an employee paid for it.
The committee approved the provision, and it was passed by Parliament. This week, Louis Mosley, the CEO of Palantir’s UK and European operations, referenced this debate to defend the controversial US tech firm’s minimal corporate tax payments in the UK as “a standard tax incentive under UK law”.
Mosley’s comments came after a report by the Centre for International Corporate Tax Accountability and Research confirmed openDemocracy’s findings that Palantir has used its share-based compensation scheme for UK employees to minimise its corporate tax obligations by millions of pounds. As we uncovered, the company paid less than £1m in corporation cash taxes in the UK last year – less than it paid in Korea, Japan, France and Germany, despite the UK being its second-largest market after the US.
The public conversation over Palantir’s tax minimisation cuts to the heart of the ongoing debate about capitalism in the UK: after a decade and a half of austerity, who should pay tax – and how much – to mend our unravelling social services and societal fabric? These questions are particularly acute in the case of Palantir, since much of the company’s profits in the UK are derived from government contracts paid for by ordinary taxpayers.
Palantir’s Mosley and former corporate tax lawyer Dan Neidle have argued that, while on paper, it could look like the corporation is avoiding tax, HMRC recoups the money via the income taxes paid by Palantir’s highly remunerated employees.
“We run a generous share scheme for our UK employees. Those shares have risen sharply in value (because of our profitability). So then has the tax bill on those shares – paid at income tax rates, which are HIGHER than corporation tax rates. UK law then offsets some of that against corporation tax, exactly as Parliament intended,” wrote Mosley on LinkedIn, claiming that the company paid $148 million in UK taxes.
“The net result of this sneaky wheeze? More tax paid by Palantir to the Treasury, not less.”
Mosley’s claims cannot be independently verified as the company’s 2025 accounts have not been published on Companies House.
“I don’t see this as tax avoidance, legally or morally,” Neidle, the founder of tax advisory nonprofit Tax Policy Associates, previously told openDemocracy. “[Palantir’s] employees in the UK will have been subject to income tax and employee/employer national insurance. So overall it likely resulted in additional tax being paid.”
🔎
We are continuing to investigate Palantir. If you have any information you feel might be relevant, please send it to info@opendemocracy.net. We protect our sources.
A look at the 2003 tax amendments by the then Labour government, and interviews with tax experts based in other countries, reveal that the UK and the US are outliers in their generous approach to taxing corporations, despite the UK’s headline 25% corporation tax.
The decision to tax employees, while granting corporations deductions, is a clear political and regulatory choice, these experts said, based on the nature of economic activity a given tax regime incentivises — in this case finance capital and Big Tech. Or more bluntly, just because a particular tax provision exists, experts said, it doesn’t mean it is justified.
“Even though this kind of huge deduction may be technically justifiable in a system of taxation, “it’s more the question of, ‘Is this fair?’” said Christoph Spengel, professor for international taxation at the University of Mannheim in Germany – a country that doesn’t allow this type of wide deduction.
“What are the observable consequences if wealth is concentrated in the hands of only a few individuals? Because that’s what this means,” he said.
Spengel said he couldn’t see the justification for such a provision, “because actually there is no cost” to the corporation: no wealth has left the company and it has not given up any of its assets. An employee’s income tax and other personal tax obligations should have no bearing on whether a company gets a deduction, he added.
“Corporations are really important players in the economy, and you want to have a tool to incentivise them to do things you like and stop them from doing things you don’t like,” said Reuven Avi-Yonah, Irwin I. Cohn professor of tax law at the University of Michigan whose work focuses on corporate and international taxation. “And the corporation tax is a very versatile instrument with which to do this.”
“A lot of people are worried about two things: the concentration of wealth in very few hands and AI,” said Kimberly Clausing, Eric M. Zolt Chair in Tax Law and Policy at the UCLA School of Law. Clausing said that while economists and policymakers are considering a wide array of novel solutions to this problem, “the same objectives could be reached much more easily if we had the will to use our corporation tax properly.”
Neidle, from Tax Policy Associates, disagreed.
“Whilst it’s true that the UK and US are outliers in a formalistic sense, in reality people achieve the same thing in most of the world. That is both reasonable and hard to stop, given that a share scheme is economically equivalent to a bonus plus a share purchase,” he said.
In Neidle’s opinion, a company giving its employees a cash bonus to buy shares was “economically identical” to just giving the employees the shares.
“It’s generally a bad idea to create different tax results from identical economic cases, and if you do (as Germany has) then it’s trivial to get round it,” he said. “The result is the same – it’s just more complicated.”
Blair-era break
At the turn of the millennium, companies in the US – particularly in the then-nascent tech sector – were increasingly compensating employees with stock instead of higher salaries. For the firms, the benefits were threefold: they retained cash that could be invested in the business, held onto employees until their shares vested, and saved on tax.
The UK government responded by taking a leaf out of the US’s playbook to amend its own corporation tax rules. When the change was passed in the early 2000s, the Treasury estimated that by 2007-08, it would lose around £95m in forgone taxes in that year, according to a reply to a Parliamentary question in 2003.
Two decades later, as openDemocracy reported, Palantir alone was able to legally use this deduction to create a tax deduction worth around £230m in 2022 – a figure the company has not contested.
“This is the main reason why US mega-corporations don’t pay any tax, because they all issue huge amounts of share-based compensation and deduct it,” Avi-Yonah told openDemocracy. “This has been true forever, it’s not a recent trend. What’s a recent trend is their incredible profitability because of AI.”
Blair-era MPs may have been unable to foresee the staggering shares-based wealth that Big Tech’s IPOs would create over the next two decades, but it is worth noting that not all countries treat corporate taxes the way the US and the UK do.
“The corporation tax deduction available in the UK is among the more generous. Stock-based compensation is supposed to reduce payroll pressure on cash flow, especially for start-ups,” Mike Lewis, the director of Tax Watch, told openDemocracy previously. “The fact that it is also available to established, profit-making companies means that it can effectively wipe out very profitable companies’ tax bills for years if share values significantly increase.”
Neidle said he was concerned that the current debate around deductions for share-based compensation was being shaped by opinions about Palantir, rather than concerns about tax policy.
“People here are starting with the conclusion they want: corporations are bad, Palantir is particularly bad. Then forcing a share scheme argument into it. It is not principled, and it’s not good policy,” he said.
Tax and Regulation
While tax laws are usually presented as a pragmatic set of rules and numbers, they are subjective and the result of policy debates, corporate lobbying and political compulsion.
For instance, corporate income tax in the early 1900s in the US is the outcome of two struggles, writes Marjorie E. Kornhauser, professor of law emerita at Tulane University: “The attempt to enact an income tax and the struggle to regulate corporations.”
As the nature of corporations has changed over the centuries, so have the arguments around how and why they should be taxed.
Corporations today are structured very differently compared to previous eras. Research conducted in the USsuggests companies are increasingly substituting wages with share-based payments.
Further, tech firms (including Palantir) increasingly rely on dual-class stock, which allows vast amounts of stock to be issued to employees without their founders worrying about losing control of their companies. Founders are therefore rewarded with unprecedented control of their businesses and greater voting rights than ordinary shareholders. When Google debuted a dual-class structure in its IPO in 2004, only about 1% of US listed companies used such a structure. By 2018, that figure had risen to 30%.
Another structural shift is the growing trend of tech companies earning a growing share of their revenue from public contracts, as governments around the world look to digitise and modernise. Palantir, for instance, earns a majority of its revenue in the US and UK from government contracts paid from public funds.
“Ultimately it’s the taxpayers who fund the money that goes to Palantir,” said Avi-Yonah. The current arrangement is a “one-sided thing where they just grab the money and don’t pay any tax, and don’t give anything back,” except its services, he said.
openDemocracy has reached out to Palantir for comment and will update the piece when they respond.
This article was updated on 8 August 2026 to include comments from Dan Neidle.
Orcas discuss Donald Trump and the killer apes’ concept of democracy. Front Orca warns that Trump is crashing his country’s economy and that everything he does he does for the fantastically wealthy.Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.
Donald Trump urges you to be a Climate Science denier like him. He says that he makes millions and millions for destroying the planet, Burn, Baby, Burn and Flood, Baby, Flood.Nigel Farage urges you to ignore facts and reality and be a climate science denier like him and his Deputy Richard Tice. He says that Reform UK has received £Millions and £Millions from the fossil fuel industry to promote climate denial and destroy the planet.Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.
