FTEP: private experts inside the State Department, on the company payroll

On 31 July 2026 the State Department’s Office of the Spokesperson published a release in which Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy Sarah Rogers launched the Freedom Tech Excellence Program (FTEP): employees of technology companies, civil society organisations and think tanks working, on limited-term assignments, inside the Department’s diplomatic work on digital freedom. The programme’s page, run by the Global Partnerships unit, opens with the line that matters most: “Participants remain employees of their home organizations throughout the assignment — maintaining their existing employment relationships while working on high-stakes, real-world diplomatic challenges alongside senior Department officials.” This is not the classic revolving door, the one where an official moves into industry or back again. Here the door is not crossed: whoever enters stays on the payroll of whoever sent them, and returns there.

What FTEP is, and where it comes from

The release describes it as “a new partnership between the Department and leading technology companies, civil society organizations, and think tanks to advance U.S. digital freedom objectives globally. Through FTEP, private sector organizations will send experts for limited-term assignments to infuse their expertise into the Department’s digital freedom work on critical issues including promoting online freedom of expression, privacy-enhancing technologies, responsible AI governance, and countering digital surveillance.” The inaugural partners, verbatim: “Under Secretary Rogers is pleased to announce FTEP’s inaugural partners: Palantir Technologies, Anduril Industries, Bitcoin Policy Institute, and Victims of Communism Foundation, and looks forward to welcoming additional organizations into the partnership.”

The launch took place on the margins of Digital NEXT: Protecting Digital Liberties in the AI Era, in San Francisco, where Rogers convened “47 foreign technology policymakers and government representatives from 30 countries.” The release frames the industry dialogues as “offering compelling alternatives to burdensome regulatory models that infringe on privacy and freedom of expression” — a framing worth noting for a European reader in particular, since it implicitly sets the American industry model against precisely the kind of regulation built in Brussels, without naming it directly. The closing conversation, hosted by the Silicon Valley Office of Protocol, featured Elon Musk, FTC Chairman Andrew N. Ferguson and Tim Hwang of the Foundation for American Innovation.

The five areas, and the one that matters most

The “Current Partnerships” page adds: “Private sector participants gain firsthand insights into foreign policy and development, while contributing their specialized skills in new and emerging areas where the Department may lack sufficient in-house expertise.” The five areas assigned to partner employees, in order: First Amendment and freedom of expression protections in the digital age; “countering unlawful digital surveillance and online scams”; privacy-enhancing technologies, including strong encryption and VPNs; responsible governance of emerging technologies, including AI; safeguarding children and other users online. The second of these deserves attention: of the four named partners, Palantir sells data-analytics platforms to governments and law enforcement — its most discussed engagement remains the ImmigrationOS contract with ICE — and Anduril builds autonomous defence systems. This is not an irregularity: it is a structural fact, disclosed by the Department itself in its own programme page, for the reader simply to register and weigh accordingly.

The Department says so itself

“FTEP gives participating organizations direct insight into how these policies impact their organizational interests and operations while helping the Department stay ahead of challenges that affect both American businesses and the rights of Americans online.” A declared double outcome, stated by the Department in its own words: it gains expertise it otherwise lacks, and the company gains direct visibility into how the policies it helps shape touch its own commercial interests.

How we check it

When a supplier brings us a position framed as “international practice” or a “market standard,” the first thing we do is trace it back to the primary source — a release, a programme page, a public register — and read it in full, not the summary handed to us: that is how we read the FTEP page before writing this piece. We build the same check into the governance system we run for our clients: a register of critical dependencies flagging, per supplier, where else they sit — bodies, committees, programmes — and in what capacity, refreshed each cycle, not filed once and forgotten.

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The positions

On 7 August 2026 The Intercept ran a critical piece on the programme, reporting objections from Carrie DeCell of the Knight First Amendment Institute and David Greene of the Electronic Frontier Foundation: the substance, as reported, concerns experts from companies with a direct commercial stake in surveillance and defence sitting inside diplomatic work on precisely freedom of expression and countering surveillance. The State Department responded that the programme “is not geared towards bolstering the Department’s internal application or operational use of AI technologies.” Palantir and Anduril did not respond to a request for comment. Three positions, none of which this piece takes as its own.

The other side, as it should be told

An administration that acknowledges it lacks sufficient in-house expertise on new subjects — encryption, AI, digital surveillance — and sources it where it exists is behaving sensibly, not opaquely. The programme was announced in an official release. The partners are named. The programme page states explicitly that participants remain employees of their own employers, and adds a written limit: “FTEP is not a career-entry vehicle. The program does not lead to employment with the U.S. Department of State.” The transparency here is high, not low: everything needed for this reading sits on public Department pages. The point is not that it is hidden. It is that buyers of technology need to account for it — and almost none do.

The operational lesson

For buyers of technology — a European reader in particular, who often imports the same suppliers and the same “practices” — the question is not moral, it is contractual:

Ask the supplier, in writing, whether and where its employees hold posts at public bodies that set the rules for the sector in which they supply you.
Separate, in the contract, advice on the rules from supply of the systems: where both sit with the same supplier, the conflict-of-interest clause cannot remain boilerplate.
Keep a register of dependencies that covers this dimension too: not just what a supplier sells you, but where it sits when it is not working for you.
When a supplier presents you a position as “international practice,” ask where that practice was formed, and who was at the table.
Verify against the primary source, not by asking the supplier: this is all public, on the sites of those who state it.

The two axes, applied

The question “where else does this supplier sit, beyond your own contract?” is a line item that belongs in the register of critical dependencies we run on our clients’ contracts — who supplies what, with what declared conflict, with what alternative — with the audit trail ready for an inspection or a board. That is the comply axis.

The same system holds contracts, suppliers, archives, business software and documents together in a single operating model, on which AI agents execute decisions with a human operator in command — for large enterprises, defence, government and healthcare. That is the decide axis: the same discipline with which we read, in who is building Mercury Systems’ ontology and in who actually answers for security behind someone else’s authorisation, where the real dependency sits beneath the announcement.

Always in two modes: on-premises, on self-contained machines that require no deep integration into your network, or a dedicated cloud, with a data centre in Italy — always with shared management: you do not need to already have someone in-house to administer AI systems.

Want to know where your suppliers sit, beyond your own contract, before they hand you a “market standard”? Talk it through with one of our engineers.