Part of Donald Trump’s One Big, Beautiful Bill—the massive spending bill that will make permanent tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans while gutting social services like Medicaid—calls for new surveillance towers for U.S. Customs and Border Protection to use on the northern and southern borders. That’s pretty standard procedure, except for one catch that The Intercept picked up on: the description of the project basically only fits the work of Palmer Luckey’s Anduril Industries.
The provision in question calls for $6 billion to be spent on border security technologies, including a “virtual wall” of surveillance towers that can detect people crossing the border. The bill says the payday can only be awarded to a company whose products have been “tested and accepted by U.S. Customs and Border Protection to deliver autonomous capabilities”—where “autonomous” is described as “a system designed to apply artificial intelligence, machine learning, computer vision, or other algorithms to accurately detect, identify, classify, and track items of interest in real time such that the system can make operational adjustments without the active engagement of personnel or continuous human command or control.”
That pretty much exclusively describes the work of Anduril, which suddenly has an effective monopoly on the very lucrative surveillance tower business. The Intercept reports that a Customs and Border Protection spokesperson confirmed that Anduril is the only company currently approved to fulfill the contract, just as Homeland Security seems set to order hundreds of new towers to be built in the coming years. Isn’t that just serendipitous timing!
You might consider the narrowly defined contract a little kickback to Anduril CEO Palmer Luckey, a longtime Trump backer who has been putting money in his campaign coffers dating back to 2016. He also hosted a fundraiser for Trump in 2020 and laid the groundwork for other Trump-curious tech CEOs, including Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen, to make their rightward shift in 2024.
Luckey and Andruil have really been digging their claws into all available military funding since the start of Trump’s second term. Earlier this year, the company took over Microsoft’s multi-billion dollar contract to build the Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS), an augmented reality headset for use by the US Army. Luckey also teamed back up with an old frenemy, the increasingly Trumpian Mark Zuckerberg, to collaborate on a project to develop AR and VR technology for the U.S. military, including a system that could detect enemy soldiers or drones.
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