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Former members of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) have launched a startup to, they say, bring “DOGE for the private sector.” Their holding company, called Special, has backing from billionaire Marc Andreessen’s venture capital firm a16z and several other former DOGE members.
In a post on a16z’s Substack, Nate Cavanaugh and Justin Fox, who led DOGE’s efforts at several government agencies, write that their startup will build “an operating system to transform critical American industries with AI,” and claim that “Main Street,” like the federal government, is inefficient. The plan, according to Fox and Cavanaugh, is to “vertically integrate,” buying up businesses in critical sectors and running them using Special’s operating system. Their first target is senior care, with a vertical called FigureHealth. In an interview on TBPN, Cavanaugh said that Special is also looking at “markets like construction, manufacturing, other very labor intensive, highly regulated markets that a lot of the learnings we had from DOGE can then get applied back into the private sector.”
Their work also purports to target waste, and cites recent Republican talking points about blue states and fraud. “One needs to look no further than childcare learning centers in Minnesota or hospice businesses in California to find immense waste at the state level from businesses that benefit from taxpayer dollars,” Fox and Cavanaugh write. Allegations of waste and fraud were key to DOGE’s own justification for cutting government contracts, jobs, and even shutting down the US Agency for International Development (USAID). Fraud allegations against Minnesota childcare centers formed the justification for President Donald Trump’s administration to deploy thousands of immigration agents to the state earlier this year.
“This pitch relies on DOGE-y tropes, with references to fraud in Minnesota. It’s a very bro-y perspective on government and what the issues are,” says Don Moynihan, a professor of public policy at the University of Michigan. “If you think the biggest issue in the American government is welfare fraud, then that suggests a pretty narrow perspective on the major challenges that we face right now. But that has been the perspective of DOGE, Musk, and the rest of the administration.”
With Andreessen Horowitz leading the funding round, Cavanaugh and Fox also say that some of their “DOGE teammates” were backing the venture, including Steve Davis, billionaire Elon Musk’s right-hand man who functioned as the coordinator of DOGE’s operations; Antonio Gracias, founder of Valor Equity Partners and a close Musk associate who was involved with DOGE’s work at the Social Security Administration; Baris Akis, a Turkish national who functioned as an informal recruiter for DOGE; Anthony Armstrong, formerly the chief financial officer at Musk’s xAI; Donald Park, who was part of DOGE’s operations at the Small Business Administration; and Adam Ramada and Brooks Morgan, who founded the Austin-based BANNER VC after leaving DOGE in August 2025. Coinbase founder Brian Armstrong, and Shyam Sankar, the chief technology officer at Palantir, the defense contracting firm co-founded by billionaire and Musk ally Peter Thiel, also participated in the funding round.
Cavanaugh and Fox did not respond to requests for comment; neither did their apparent investors.
While part of DOGE, Cavanaugh and Fox led the forcible takeover of the Congressionally-funded nonprofit organization, the US Institute of Peace (USIP). After being installed as USIP’s acting director, Cavanaugh attempted to gift its building to the government, a move that is currently the subject of an ongoing court case. Cavanaugh was also appointed the acting director of the Interagency Council on Homelessness. At both institutions, Cavanaugh put nearly all staff members on administrative leave.
