Clark Minor Appointed HHS CTO/CIO Directly From 12-Year Palantir Tenure — Palantir's Global Head of Cloud Becomes Top IT Official at the Department That Holds Medicaid Data

On February 13, 2025, Clark Minor — a 12-year Palantir Technologies veteran who most recently served as the company’s Global Head of Cloud (August 2013 – April 2024) — was appointed Chief Technology Officer (later listed as Chief Information Officer in various HHS communications) of the Department of Health and Human Services under Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Bloomberg reported the appointment the following day with the framing that Minor would “run all data and IT security for RFK Jr.’s health department.”

Minor’s ProPublica financial disclosure documents the scale of his Palantir exposure at entry:

• $1M–$5M in Palantir stock held on entry to government
• $244K salary plus $100K–$1M in capital gains from Palantir RSUs
• Sold $1M–$5M in PLTR in July 2025, five months after entering HHS
• Palantir Technologies listed under Employment Assets and Compensation sections of his disclosure (not merely as passive stock ownership)

The Personnel Handoff

Minor’s transition is the cleanest single-employee revolving-door case in the Palantir-HHS axis:

• August 2013 – April 2024: Software engineer at Palantir → led platform infrastructure and cloud strategy → Global Head of Cloud. Worked on Palantir Gotham. MIT graduate.
• April 2024 – February 2025: Brief out-of-Palantir window (exact activities unclear from public reporting)
• February 13, 2025: Appointed HHS CTO/CIO under Secretary RFK Jr.

He did not transition through intermediate private-sector employment, consulting, or academic roles. He went directly from running Palantir’s cloud infrastructure to running HHS’s.

The Agency Context

Minor’s appointment occurred during HHS’s most aggressive restructuring in decades:

• ~10,000-person workforce reduction ordered by the Trump administration
• Deep cuts to HHS tech offices (documented by Nextgov in April 2025) — officials across multiple technology divisions were placed on administrative leave or reassigned
• Consolidation and elimination of HHS divisions running in parallel to the workforce reduction
• The $90M SHARE BPA (Palantir Foundry availability to all HHS agencies) originally established May 2022 was simultaneously being expanded in use

The cuts and the Palantir appointment fit together structurally: HHS’s internal IT workforce was being reduced at the same time the top IT role was being filled from Palantir and the Foundry platform was becoming the department-wide data analytics infrastructure.

What Minor’s Portfolio Encompasses

As HHS CTO/CIO, Minor has authority over:

• CMS (Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services) — custodian of 79 million Medicaid enrollees’ personal data, including names, addresses, birth dates, ethnic and racial information, and Social Security numbers
• NIH (National Institutes of Health) — already a Palantir Foundry user
• CDC (Centers for Disease Control) — already a Palantir Foundry user
• FDA (Food and Drug Administration) — already a Palantir Foundry user
• SAMHSA (Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration)
• HRSA, ACL, ACF, and other HHS sub-agencies

The Immediately Consequential Outcome

The July 2025 data-sharing agreement between CMS and ICE — giving ICE access to the personal data of 79 million Medicaid enrollees (2025-10-01–cms-shares-medicaid-data-with-ice) — was executed during Minor’s tenure as HHS CTO/CIO. The agreement was the technical-operational foundation for Palantir’s ELITE targeting tool (documented in 2026-02-19–ice-covert-suburban-tactics-palantir-elite-surveillance and exposed publicly by EFF on January 15, 2026). The data flows from HHS (Minor’s portfolio) → Palantir’s ELITE platform (Minor’s former employer) → ICE targeting operations.

Minor was in a position to shape the technical implementation and data-flow architecture of a pipeline that ultimately connected his former employer to his agency’s most sensitive protected-population data.

Significance

Clark Minor’s appointment is the highest-dollar individual direct Palantir revolving-door case in the 144-appointee Palantir disclosure cluster (2026-04-23–144-trump-appointees-palantir-disclosures). It is also structurally the most consequential: not the largest equity position (Thomas M. Williams’s spouse holds more), but the one placed at the specific agency pivot point where HHS protected data meets Palantir’s platform infrastructure.

The Revolving Door Project, which tracks revolving-door appointments across administrations, has categorized Minor as a “DOGE Agent” — one of several DOGE-adjacent tech appointees whose federal roles connect to their pre-government corporate employers’ federal-contract revenue.

Research Gaps

• Minor’s specific activities between leaving Palantir in April 2024 and joining HHS in February 2025
• The specific role Minor played in approving or implementing the July 2025 CMS-ICE data-sharing agreement
• Whether Minor’s ethics agreement includes a recusal from Palantir-specific contracts, and whether that recusal has been tested
• The degree to which Minor’s July 2025 $1M–$5M PLTR sale coincided with specific PLTR contract-award news
• Minor’s relationship to the other seven Palantir-connected HHS appointees (Michael Stuart, Matthew Buckham, Lowell Zeta, George Sigounas, James McElroy, Mary M. Lazare, West Cuthbert)
• The scope of Palantir Foundry’s adoption across HHS sub-agencies since Minor’s appointment

Related Entries

• 2025-10-01–cms-shares-medicaid-data-with-ice — the data-sharing agreement executed during Minor’s tenure
• 2026-02-19–ice-covert-suburban-tactics-palantir-elite-surveillance — ELITE tool deployment using HHS data
• 2026-04-23–144-trump-appointees-palantir-disclosures — the broader personnel-capture pattern
• 2026-04-18–palantir-22-point-manifesto-published — ideological production layer
• 2026-04-10–trump-truthsocial-palantir-pltr-endorsement — stock-price intervention
• palantir — organization profile (existing in cascade-research)
• warehouse-fungibility-and-the-detention-hedge — the broader capture-cascade framework
• hhs-palantir-cluster — (see the cascade-research analysis entry below)