OGE Form 278e (June 2025): Saurabh Sharma, White House PPO Special Assistant for Personnel, Discloses Palantir Technologies Class A Common Stock — Personnel-Selection Gatekeeper with Equity in Federal Surveillance Contractor

Saurabh Sharma — Special Assistant to the President for Personnel at the White House Office of Presidential Personnel (PPO), appointed January 21, 2025 — disclosed holdings in Palantir Technologies Inc. Class A Common Stock on his OGE Form 278e (electronically signed May 6, 2025; accepted by agency ethics official; posted June 2025 by the White House). The holding is valued in the $1,001–$15,000 range per OGE standard disclosure bands. Sharma is simultaneously one of the administration’s four Special Assistants to the President for Personnel — the gatekeepers of federal executive-branch appointments — and a stockholder in Palantir Technologies, the Thiel-network-affiliated surveillance-defense contractor operating across the agencies he helps to staff.

What Happened / Key Facts

Sharma’s OGE Form 278e is the primary tier-1 source for three structural facts:

1. The position: Sharma served as Transition Coordinator for the Trump Vance 2025 Transition Inc. (December 2024–January 2025) and was appointed Special Assistant to the President for Personnel on January 21, 2025 — the day after inauguration. Per Washington Examiner reporting (March 5, 2025), he is among “the most influential unheralded White House aides because of his role controlling who carries out the president’s orders.” Sharma stated on his LinkedIn profile that “In the first 100 days I had the honor of installing over 3,000 presidential appointees.”

2. The equity: Palantir Technologies Inc. Class A Common Stock disclosed at the $1,001–$15,000 valuation band. This is a small personal position by typical tech-equity standards. Its structural significance is not monetary — it is positional. The person controlling executive-branch staffing decisions across agencies holds equity in the contractor whose federal contracts are administered by those agencies and whose personnel serve within them.

3. The prior employer: The Form 278e also confirms Sharma received salary/bonus of approximately $110,869 from American Moment Inc. in 2024 — the organization whose database of 700–3,000 vetted young conservatives became, per Washington Examiner (March 2025), “a primary document used by Trump’s White House Office of Presidential Personnel.” Sharma built the database, moved inside PPO to implement it, and holds equity in the surveillance contractor that the agencies he helps to staff now operate.

The Captured-X Structural Pattern

This disclosure is one instance of a broader captured-X structural pattern documented across Investigation 2: individuals who hold equity in Palantir — the Thiel-network’s flagship federal surveillance-defense contractor — are simultaneously positioned at the command points of the federal machinery that Palantir’s contracts depend on. The 144-appointee population in the ProPublica disclosure database (see 2026-04-23–144-trump-appointees-palantir-disclosures) is the aggregate; Sharma is the single case where the equity-holder’s function is personnel selection itself — not policy, not procurement, not enforcement, but the gatekeeping of who fills all those roles.

The pattern has three distinguishable structural layers:

• Policy-over-program conflicts (Stephen Miller: immigration policy architect holds PLTR while PLTR operates ImmigrationOS)
• Procurement-authority conflicts (Kevin Rhodes / Gregory Barbaccia: procurement officials hold PLTR while setting federal IT procurement rules)
• Personnel-selection conflicts (Sharma: PPO gatekeeper holds PLTR while his vetting function controls appointments at DHS, DoD, HHS — the agencies with the largest Palantir contracts)

The third layer is structurally distinct because it operates upstream of policy and procurement: if the individuals who staff the procurement and policy functions are themselves selected through a PPO function held by a Palantir equity-holder, the conflict reproduces through every downstream appointment.

American Moment: The Personnel Pipeline Context

Sharma is an alumnus and co-founder of american-moment, the Thiel-network-adjacent personnel-vetting organization whose founding board included JD Vance (from inception, 2021), whose seed financing was arranged by Blake Masters through Thiel Capital, and whose ongoing operations were funded in part by David Sacks. American Moment is not incidental to Sharma’s White House role — it is the mechanism: Sharma built the vetted-conservative database at American Moment, then moved inside PPO to use it. The OGE Form 278e connects the equity held by the person who built and implements that pipeline to the Thiel-network’s flagship contractor.

The connection is structural, not documented as a coordination agreement: Sharma holds a modest Palantir stock position; Joe Lonsdale (Palantir co-founder) holds approximately 1% of Palantir equity (Forbes estimate); both are nodes in the same Thiel-network-adjacent ecosystem linked through Vance, American Moment, and the National Conservatism conference infrastructure where American Moment and Palantir-aligned figures share platforms. No tier-1 source documents a direct Lonsdale-Sharma bilateral relationship; the claim is the geometry of position, not an inferred conspiracy.

Why This Event Matters

The Sharma OGE disclosure is the personnel-selection-infrastructure layer of the Palantir federal capture architecture. Unlike procurement conflicts (where the equity-holder influences which contracts are awarded) or policy conflicts (where the equity-holder shapes the regulatory environment), a personnel-selection conflict operates recursively: the equity-holder’s function determines who fills the positions that make procurement and policy decisions.

Three structural consequences follow:

1. Self-reinforcing placement: If PPO personnel selection is influenced — formally or through shared ideological formation — by the networks that seeded American Moment (Vance, Sacks, Thiel Capital), then the individuals placed by PPO at DHS, DoD, and HHS will disproportionately reflect those networks. The 144-appointee Palantir equity population in the disclosure database is partly an artifact of this upstream selection logic.

2. Conflict depth over time: The Palantir equity position is disclosed at $1,001–$15,000. If Sharma’s PPO function contributed to the placement of Palantir-aligned figures at agencies holding Palantir contracts, the dollar-scale of the conflict (in aggregate contract value affected) is orders of magnitude larger than the personal equity position suggests.

3. Ethics recusal gap: Whether Sharma filed a formal ethics recusal from decisions directly affecting American Moment Inc.’s government pipeline interests is not confirmed in available documents. American Moment’s interests — placing more of its alumni, demonstrating pipeline success to funders — are structurally affected by PPO decisions Sharma participates in. The Palantir equity recusal question is secondary to this.

Research Gaps

• Equity acquisition mechanism and date: The OGE 278e discloses the Palantir holding but not when or how Sharma acquired it. A pre-IPO acquisition (Palantir IPO: September 2020, direct listing) or a transition-period acquisition would carry different analytical weight than a routine post-IPO market purchase.
• Palantir recusal: No documentation confirms whether Sharma filed a Palantir-specific ethics recusal covering PPO decisions affecting agencies with active Palantir contracts.
• American Moment ethics recusal: No documentation confirms a formal recusal from PPO decisions with implications for American Moment’s alumni-placement interests.
• PPO portfolio scope: Sharma is one of four SAPPs at PPO; his specific portfolio (which agencies, appointment tiers, vetting-criteria authority) is not delineated in available sources.
• 2024 annual update or amended disclosure: If Sharma filed an updated or amended OGE disclosure after the June 2025 posting, any changes (disposal of PLTR, acquisition of additional positions) would be material.

Related Entries

• sharma-saurabh — Full actor profile with career chronology, network position, and OGE Form 278e analysis
• american-moment — American Moment organization profile; Thiel-network-adjacent personnel pipeline Sharma co-founded and used as PPO supply side
• 2026-04-23–144-trump-appointees-palantir-disclosures — 144-appointee population-level Palantir conflict pattern; Sharma appears in the White House cluster
• vance-jd — American Moment founding board advisor; political principal whose personnel priorities PPO operationalizes
• lonsdale-joe — Palantir co-founder; structural equity-overlap with Sharma’s disclosed PLTR; Lonsdale-Vance-Sacks operational coordination triangle
• sacks-david — American Moment seed funder; White House AI-Crypto Czar peer inside executive branch simultaneously
• epic-inv2-palantir-federal-capture — Parent investigation tracking Palantir’s federal capture architecture