Are Democrats About to Pull Nearly $250 Billion in Public Money from the Companies Dismantling Democracy?

Somewhere in your state’s pension fund, right now, there are shares in a company called Palantir Technologies. Many of you already know Palantir. For those who don’t: ICE paid them $30 million in April 2025 to build a platform called ImmigrationOS, which tracks people in near-real-time, prioritizes them for arrest, and monitors whether they leave the country voluntarily. Palantir’s federal contracts nearly doubled last year, reaching $970.5 million. Stephen Miller, the architect of the administration’s enforcement agenda, holds a financial stake in the company.

Your tax dollars own a piece of that. So do most public employee pensions in the state, most city operating budgets, most county fleet contracts.

Somewhere in your government’s budget, there is a line item for software made by a company that sells personal data on 282 million Americans to ICE, data that ICE’s own contracting documents describe as “critical” because the agency cannot legally collect it on its own. There is probably a contract with a company whose facial recognition tool searches 50 billion images scraped from the internet, and gets the answer wrong more often when the face belongs to a person of color, a woman, or someone over 65.

Nobody voted for any of this. No city council held a hearing. No state legislature debated whether public dollars should finance a surveillance and detention apparatus that now holds a record 73,000 people on any given day, three quarters of whom have never been convicted of a crime. The money just flows. It flows through pension investments and procurement contracts and software licenses, and the companies on the receiving end take it from both directions: they collect public dollars from your state with one hand and collect federal enforcement contracts with the other.

That is the gap. And every level of government in America can close it tomorrow.

Here is what state legislatures, city councils, county commissions, and union pension boards can do, right now, without permission from Congress or the White House. Any of them can pass a law or a resolution that does two things. First, it requires the jurisdiction to divest its public funds, including pension investments, from the corporations providing material support for authoritarian governance. Second, it makes it against the law for the jurisdiction to sign contracts with those companies. No new deals. No renewals. When the current contract expires, the relationship ends. Any company bidding on government work above $25,000 has to certify in writing that it is not on the list.

The scale of what that means is not symbolic. Democratic-controlled states, cities, counties, and public pension funds have an estimated $176 to $240 billion in total financial exposure to the 26 companies on this list, including $5 to $10 billion flowing annually through contracts and tax subsidies. Blue-state pension funds alone hold somewhere between $170 and $230 billion in these companies’ stock, concentrated heavily in the five major tech companies whose executives donated to the inaugural fund and then collected federal regulatory favors in return. The annual contract and subsidy pipeline, the money that renews every year and that these companies actively budget for, runs $5 to $10 billion from blue jurisdictions specifically. Coordinated divestment across the 14 largest blue-state pension systems would trigger forced stock sales at a scale these companies would feel within the week.

The movement is already underway. California passed AB 32 in 2019 prohibiting CalPERS from holding private prison stocks; CalSTRS and the New York State Common Retirement Fund followed with their own divestments. Eight major banks eliminated an estimated 87.4 percent of GEO Group and CoreCivic's credit lines in a single year, forcing both companies to seek financing from a Japanese bank. Twenty-three New York state senators formally demanded Tesla divestment in March 2025. Pennsylvania's pension board voted to pursue it. The New York City pension system has been publicly scrutinized for holding $457 million in Palantir while the company builds the platform ICE uses to track people for arrest. None of this happened because of federal legislation or presidential action. It happened because people with pension boards and procurement authority decided to use them.

Governors do not have to wait. Every state grants its governor emergency powers, and what is happening at the border, in detention facilities holding 73,000 people, and inside federal data systems meets any reasonable definition of an emergency under state law. A governor who declares one unlocks a separate and substantially broader set of statutory authorities, typically defined in the state’s emergency management code, that allow for the redirection of spending, suspension of certain regulatory requirements, and action at a speed that normal governance does not permit. Twenty-four Democratic governors hold that authority right now, over states that produce roughly half the country’s GDP. Add the blue cities inside red states, places like Houston, Atlanta, Dallas, Nashville, Miami, and Charlotte, each of which controls its own procurement budget and pension board, and the combined leverage runs into the trillions.

Mayors and city councils have the same tools at the municipal level. The mayor can act. The city council can pass an ordinance. The city comptroller can direct divestment of city pension and investment funds. Portland banned facial recognition outright. San Francisco banned it. Boston, Oakland, Minneapolis, and more than a dozen other cities followed. More than 26 jurisdictions have already passed laws requiring public oversight of police surveillance technology. Every one of those cities moved without waiting for its state legislature, under existing procurement and investment authority that every city in America already holds.

Union pension boards sit outside government entirely, which means they face no preemption questions, no state legislative calendar, no gubernatorial veto. They answer to their members and to their fiduciary duty. The Chicago Teachers’ pension fund has already done this. Any union pension board in the country can bring a resolution to the next board meeting and vote on it the same day. Public pension systems nationwide hold a combined $4.5 trillion in assets; the five major tech companies on this list are among the largest holdings in every index fund those pensions own. When boards move in coordination, these companies feel it in their stock price within the week.

The 26 companies fall into five categories, and listing them makes the architecture of the thing visible in a way that abstractions about “the surveillance state” never quite manage.

There are the surveillance and data companies. Palantir, which built ImmigrationOS. Clearview AI, which scraped 50 billion photos from the internet and sold the database to ICE for $9.2 million. LexisNexis, whose Accurint system generates profiles on 282 million people and whose data ICE agents queried more than 1.2 million times in seven months. Thomson Reuters, whose CLEAR platform aggregates court records, driving records, utility data, and social media posts into searchable profiles, and which feeds directly into Palantir’s system. ShadowDragon, Babel Street, and PenLink, which map social networks, track cell phone locations, and combine both into automated monitoring tools. Paragon Solutions, which sells spyware that can crack open WhatsApp and Signal, spyware the Biden administration suspended after it was used against journalists and human rights workers, and which this administration reactivated.

There are the private detention companies. GEO Group and CoreCivic run about 90 percent of private immigration detention in the country. Together they donated nearly $2.8 million to the 2024 campaign and inaugural of the administration whose enforcement policies fill their beds. GEO’s chairman called 2025 the “most successful year for new business wins” in the company’s history, the same year the detention population hit a record 73,000 and facilities reported severe overcrowding, substandard medical care, and conditions a federal lawsuit called unconstitutional. CSI Aviation held contracts worth more than $1.6 billion to fly people out of the country in defiance of court orders; its subcontractor GlobalX attempted to remove 76 unaccompanied minors to Guatemala before a judge stopped it. Acquisition Logistics, a company with zero experience in incarceration before January 2025, became ICE’s third-largest contractor. Three people have died in its sole facility.

There are the Musk-controlled entities. Tesla, SpaceX, X Corp, xAI, the Boring Company, Neuralink. Elon Musk donated $277 million to the 2024 campaign, then ran DOGE, then watched the DOJ drop investigations into his own companies while DOGE terminated 317,000 federal employees and accessed the personal data of millions of citizens. His companies have collected at least $38 billion in government contracts, loans, subsidies, and tax credits over two decades.

There is Anduril Industries, which builds autonomous surveillance towers for the border and formed a joint bidding consortium with Palantir for military contracts, collecting more than $220 million in government contract actions since January 2025.

And then there are the Big Tech companies: Meta, Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft, and Apple. Each donated to the inaugural fund or offered billions in discounted services while holding or seeking federal contracts. Microsoft’s IVAS headset program, worth up to $22 billion, transferred to Anduril in February 2025, creating a direct pipeline from Microsoft’s technology to a company building autonomous border surveillance. Amazon Web Services provides cloud infrastructure to federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies.

The smart way to structure this divides them into two tiers. Tier 1 covers the core surveillance, detention, unlawful enforcement, spyware, and data broker companies, plus the Musk entities. For Tier 1, the prohibition kicks in within 180 days. Alternatives to these companies exist. The moral case for severing ties is direct. The transition costs are manageable.

Tier 2 covers the Big Tech companies, and any serious version of this law would treat them differently because it has to take the practical objections seriously. Meta, Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft, and Apple are embedded in the operational technology of nearly every government in America. Ripping them out overnight would be reckless. So Tier 2 gets a 540-day phase-in, and existing enterprise software licenses can continue until their next renewal date. The jurisdiction’s chief information officer has to certify in writing if a genuine alternative does not exist.

That is the design on purpose: aggressive enough to matter, practical enough to survive a committee hearing.

Thirty-eight states have already passed laws that do essentially the same thing, just pointed in a different direction. Those are the anti-BDS laws, the ones that condition government contracts and pension investments on whether a company participates in boycotts of Israel. The legal architecture is identical: the state says, “We get to decide where our money goes, and we choose not to send it to companies whose conduct offends our values.” The Eighth Circuit upheld Arkansas’s anti-BDS law in 2022, and the Supreme Court declined to review that decision. Every state that narrowed its anti-BDS law to cover companies with 10 or more employees and contracts above $100,000 has not been successfully challenged on the merits at the appellate level.

If 38 states can tell companies they will lose government contracts for boycotting Israel, then every state, city, county, and union pension board in America can tell companies they will lose contracts for defying the Constitution, violating civil liberties, committing human rights abuses, and dismantling democracy.

The constitutional framework supporting this is well-established. The market participant doctrine, confirmed by the Supreme Court in multiple decisions, holds that when a state acts as a buyer or investor rather than a regulator, it enjoys broad protection from federal interference. The anti-commandeering doctrine, reinforced in Murphy v. NCAA (2018), prevents the federal government from dictating what state legislatures may do. And the Comprehensive Iran Sanctions, Accountability, and Divestment Act of 2010, which passed the Senate 99-0, explicitly recognized that state divestment decisions “are not preempted by any Federal law or regulation.”

The law can include an enforcement mechanism giving any taxpayer standing to sue for compliance. It can include a designation process so the list of covered companies grows as new players enter the market and shrinks as companies walk away from enforcement contracts. It can include an interstate coordination provision, because the more jurisdictions that adopt it, the greater the collective purchasing power and the lower the transition costs for everyone. And it can require public reporting, semiannual for the first three years, so voters can see exactly how the transition is proceeding and hold officials accountable when it stalls.

When eight banks walked away from private prison financing, GEO Group and CoreCivic scrambled for capital and had to go to a Japanese bank for loans. When New York City divested $48 million from private prisons in 2017, the pension funds’ returns were unaffected. When CalPERS divested from tobacco, early estimates suggested losses, but the actual performance data showed no measurable negative impact. An independent study found that six major U.S. public pension funds would have been $21 billion richer had they divested from fossil fuels a decade earlier. Avoiding companies engaged in morally compromised business lines is not a drag on returns. It is, by the numbers, the prudent fiduciary choice.

For the Big Tech transition, jurisdictions can leverage existing cooperative purchasing infrastructure. NASPO ValuePoint, the cooperative purchasing division of the National Association of State Procurement Officials, already allows one state to run a competitive procurement and share the resulting contract with all 50 states. Sourcewell serves more than 50,000 government members. Denmark is migrating from Microsoft to LibreOffice. Germany’s Schleswig-Holstein is moving 30,000 workstations to Linux. France deployed more than 100,000 Linux machines in its police force. Transition at scale has been done before. It just requires the political decision to start.

Every public dollar that flows to Palantir funds a platform that locates a person, flags them for arrest, and tracks whether they fled the country fast enough to avoid it, all without a warrant, all without a charge, all in direct violation of the Fourth Amendment’s guarantee against unreasonable search and seizure. Every pension fund share in GEO Group is a financial bet that more human beings will be caged next quarter than this one, in facilities a federal court has already called unconstitutional. Every dollar flowing to Clearview AI pays for a facial recognition system scraping your face from the internet without your consent, then selling it to a government agency that cannot legally collect it any other way. Every software license renewed with LexisNexis or Thomson Reuters keeps open a pipeline through which ICE queries the private data of 282 million Americans more than a million times a year, data that includes where you live, what you drive, what you owe, and who you know. These companies are not neutral vendors. They are the architecture of a surveillance and detention state that is dismantling the First Amendment right to organize, the Fourth Amendment right to privacy, and the Fifth Amendment right to due process, one contract at a time, paid for with your money.

The legal authority to stop it already exists. Thirty-eight states proved it when they conditioned public contracts on corporate conduct toward Israel. Congress confirmed it unanimously when it blessed state-level divestment from Iran. Cities from New York to Portland have already done it on surveillance and private prisons.

What has been missing is the political will to use these tools, and a clear enough picture of what we are financing to make that will unavoidable.

Now we have both.

Here is what you do with it. Do one, do five, do all ten. Find your officials at openstates.org, your city’s website, or your state’s .gov page. Call or email. Say this:

Your governor: “Declare a state of emergency and use the powers that declaration unlocks to direct all state agencies to cease entering new contracts with corporations providing material support for unconstitutional surveillance, unlawful detention, and enforcement operations conducted in defiance of court orders, and to direct the state treasurer to begin divestment. The detention of 73,000 people without conviction, the deployment of AI surveillance against the civilian population, and the defiance of federal court orders meet the definition of an emergency under your state’s law. Act accordingly.”
Your state treasurer: “Divest state pension funds from corporations providing material support for unconstitutional surveillance, unlawful detention, and enforcement operations that violate civil liberties and defy court orders. You have the fiduciary authority. New York City and CalPERS have already done it.”
Your state representative: “Introduce legislation requiring the state to divest public funds from and end contracts with corporations providing material support for authoritarian governance. Thirty-eight states already condition contracts on corporate conduct through anti-BDS laws. Use that same authority.”
Your state senator: Same message as above.
Your mayor: “Use your emergency authority to direct the city to review and terminate contracts with these corporations. Portland and San Francisco acted without waiting for their state legislatures.”
Your city treasurer or comptroller: “Divest city pension and investment funds from these companies. NYC divested $48 million from private prisons in 2017 with no impact on returns.”
Your city council member: “Introduce an ordinance requiring the city to divest and prohibit contracts with these corporations. Twenty-six cities have already passed surveillance oversight laws. This is the next step.”
Your county commissioner: “Pass a resolution divesting county funds and ending county contracts with corporations profiting from unconstitutional surveillance and unlawful detention operations.”
Your union representative: “Bring a resolution to the pension board to divest union pension funds from these companies. The Chicago Teachers’ pension fund already did it.”
Your state attorney general: “Join the coalition of Democratic AGs challenging federal overreach and investigate state contracting relationships with corporations providing material support for authoritarian governance.”

Every one of these officials controls a checkbook. Every one of them can act.

Let us know in the comments how many you do. I’ll be doing one a day over the next week with my morning coffee.

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