How Trump’s Budget Bill Sells Out The Future to Big Tech

It’s no wonder Big Tech’s lobbyists are flocking to Washington, DC, wining and dining lawmakers to curry their favor. President Donald Trump’s so-called “Big Beautiful Bill” is a massive hand out to the tech industry that comes at the expense of the people. A close reading of the budget bill – passed in both chambers of Congress this week and now headed to the President’s desk – reveals that the government’s interests and actions are now squarely aligned with Silicon Valley. If Republican leaders succeed in passing this bill into law, the government will fund the acquisition of more Silicon Valley AI to expand surveillance and bolster the wealth and power of the tech oligarchy.

This budget reveals the intersection at which the anti-immigrant Right and the tech Right converge. Under the version of the bill headed to the president’s desk, US Customs and Border Protection's (CBP) 2024 budget of $23 billion would nearly triple. Some portion of this supplemental funding, which is estimated to exceed $60 billion, would result in bigger contracts to surveillance technology corporations. An additional $2.8 billion is allocated for “other surveillance technologies” along the southwest, northern, and maritime borders. This may include an expansion of the “surveillance towers” operated by Anduril Industries. Anduril was founded by Trump supporter Palmer Luckey, who has raked in billions of dollars worth of contracts since Trump took office.

Palantir co-founder and early Facebook investor Peter Thiel also appears set to gain from this bill. $700 million dollars are set aside for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)’s “information technology investments to support enforcement and removal operations.” Based on previous Department of Homeland Security (DHS) contracts, a significant portion of this funding is likely to flow to Palantir, the data-mining giant co-founded by Thiel. Palantir, whose CEO has boasted the company is “making America more lethal,” supercharges ICE’s ability to monitor, locate, and detain individuals.

Indeed, this budget bill will fund a substantial increase in the surveillance, deportation, and detention of immigrants, expanding these practices to an unprecedented scale. Those alarmed by the ongoing daylight abductions by ICE agents in Los Angeles and around the country need to be clear that this new bill will enable even more aggressive enforcement.

This massive injection of cash into the surveillance-detention-deportation machine will also increase surveillance of all Americans – likely Black Americans most of all, considering the reality of how aggressively local and state law enforcement already target Black communities. The bill provides $6.2 billion for border technology and screening, which includes the deployment of biometric technology. Information derived from facial recognition, iris scans, and DNA will be collected and fed into DHS’ centralized biometric repository, the Automated Biometric Identification System (IDENT). IDENT is accessed not only by ICE, but also the Department of Justice (DOJ) and state and local law enforcement. This data will be used for tracking, profiling, and policing, despite an abundance of documentation of the ways in which this technology does not work; it infamously misidentifies people, especially people of color, leading to wrongful arrests and detentions.

These investments in anti-immigrant enforcement and surveillance are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to how the bill favors Silicon Valley. Billions are committed to defense and homeland security priorities, including development of the artificial intelligence ecosystem, drones and other unmanned and autonomous systems, advanced cybersecurity infrastructure, quantum computing initiatives, next-generation telecommunications deployment, and expansive investments in data and cloud computing systems. Investments in militarization and war will always be at the expense of millions of Americans' healthcare and food security.

This bill makes one thing crystal clear: corporate-state collusion is accelerating, threatening to fully convert the US into an authoritarian state. Tech oligarchs are seizing unprecedented control over the economy and government. As the House now votes on one of the biggest investments in state surveillance ever, it is also considering one of the biggest wealth transfers to billionaires in US history.

Here’s the good news. Despite Big Tech’s outsized influence in DC, people’s voices still matter. On Tuesday, following weeks of bipartisan push-back from around the country, the Senate voted 99-1 to remove a dangerous AI regulation moratorium. The provision would have given corporations a green light to deploy AI with no guardrails, and no accountability. States would have been powerless to regulate AI unless they agreed to onerous conditions. Corporations and governments have already been deploying AI that harms communities: from chatbots encouraging self-harm to non consensual deepfakes, and disinformation. Under the moratorium, automated decisions around hiring, housing, healthcare, and financial services would have had limited oversight or consequences despite documented cases of racial and gender bias, among others errors.

The moratorium would also likely have prohibited states from regulating the rapid expansion of data centers, which are extracting major amounts of electricity and water all over the country. Communities that are not able to block the development of these data centers are often forced to hand over land, water, energy, and tax subsidies to Big Tech. These invasive structures can raise utility prices and poison communities of color, including a historically Black community in Memphis that is experiencing the health and environmental costs of rapid data center expansion right now.

While the moratorium on the enforcement of state AI laws is temporarily shelved, we know that tech companies won’t stop trying to advance AI without guardrails. We must continue to sound the alarm that Big Tech corporations and anti-immigrant government and military agencies will be the biggest beneficiaries of this bill becoming law. As millions of Americans denounced the administration and its aims in mass protests just weeks ago, communities across the country are rising up to reject the Republican-led government’s tech-powered xenophobia and racism. To defend our communities, we must join them and collectively organize to fight Big Tech's control over the future.