DOGE Failed. Its Staffers Want to Try Again. - The Atlantic

Shooters shoot. Builders build. And DOGE alumni make splashy announcements about entering complex industries with scant qualifications while promising to “root out waste.”<br>This, at least, is the premise of Special, a newly announced start-up co-founded by Justin Fox and Nate Cavanaugh, two former Department of Government Efficiency staffers who left the federal government “motivated to extend the ethos of our work at DOGE back into the private sector,” as they wrote on Special’s website. The company officially launched last week with funding from the Elon Musk–friendly contingent of Silicon Valley, including the venture groups Andreessen Horowitz and Human Capital. Special is also backed by investments from numerous Musk associates, including Steve Davis, Musk’s top lieutenant at DOGE. The company’s tagline is “You know it when you see it.”<br>On X, Special’s launch was touted by many of its investors and various hangers-on belonging to a loose tech-right coalition as the beginnings of a supposed “DOGE mafia.” “Incredible team meets amazing mission meets magical time,” Marc Andreessen posted; “Founders are special. Builders are special. America is @Special,” Katherine Boyle, Andreessen Horowitz’s head of American Dynamism, wrote on the platform.<br>It’s worth pausing here to examine the fundamental premise of Special as DOGE for the private sector. You might have a few questions, including but not limited to: Wait, I thought DOGE was supposed to be about taking private-sector business acumen and bringing it to the bloated public sector? Isn’t the private sector already run like the private sector? How is Special going to run the DOGE playbook inside these companies? Isn’t this essentially just what a consulting firm does? Or private equity? And then, of course: Wasn’t DOGE a deeply unpopular, failed experiment that saved a small fraction of its claimed savings while cutting more than 10,000 government contracts, including lifesaving international aid?<br>I reached out to Fox and Cavanaugh via Special’s website and their personal accounts but got no responses. According to its website, Special is a “new kind of holding company, building an AI operating system to transform critical American industries.” Special plans to acquire companies inside industries it thinks are broken and inefficient and then use a proprietary AI-powered operating system to “transform the efficiency of these businesses, root out waste, and deliver a great customer experience for American taxpayers.”<br>As to what that vague mission looks like in practice, Special announced that its first target is elder care, through a second start-up called Figure Health. The website for Figure Health offers little more in way of explanation, citing a three-pronged approach to its service: AI tools streamline operations at senior-care businesses; these businesses use the money saved to increase pay for their nurses; and that, in turn, leads to “better care for seniors.” In an interview last week, Fox seemed to suggest that the company’s tech aims to eliminate health-care busywork, such as note-taking. Figure Health’s website says it will have three locations, “coming soon,” in Dallas, Miami, and Chicago. The careers and locations links on the site appear not to work, redirecting back to Figure Health’s landing page. When I ran images of people featured on the website’s homepage in Figure Health–branded scrubs through an AI-image detector, they came up as “likely created by AI.”<br>In a blog post about the launch, Fox and Cavanaugh claim that Figure Health is under contract with a health-care company in Texas that “serves over 1,400 patients and employs hundreds of nurses.” They do not name the company. I emailed the contact address provided on Figure Health’s website but did not get a response.<br>With so few details to go on, I looked to Fox and Cavanaugh’s DOGE tenure to get an understanding of their qualifications. The pair were arguably not as high profile in the department as Musk lieutenants such as Davis or even young staffers such as Edward “Big Balls” Coristine, the then-19-year-old engineer who was granted access to federal payroll systems. (Cavanaugh is 30, and Fox is in his late 20s.) But Cavanaugh, at least, made a name for himself in the spring of 2025, when he was installed as the acting president of the United States Institute of Peace think tank as well as the acting director of the Interagency Council on Homelessness. According to Wired, he put most of both staffs on administrative leave and tried to gift the Institute of Peace’s $500 million building to the federal government. (A court case about the attempted transfer is ongoing; government lawyers defended the move as consistent with an executive order from Trump to reduce the institute’s work as much as possible.)<br>Fox and Cavanaugh both became better known this year when the American Historical Association published hours of deposition...