Former DOGE members and Elon Musk allies are backing a startup aimed at using AI to apply 'learnings' from DOGE to the private sector.
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, 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.
". “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“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, a Turkish national who functioned as an informal recruiter for DOGE; Anthony Armstrong, formerly the chief financial officer at Musk’s xAI;; 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.forcible takeover of the Congressionally-funded nonprofit organization, the US Institute of Peace . After being installed as USIP’s acting director, Cavanaugh attempted to gift. 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.claimed that DOGE members had compromised sensitive data and appeared to be exfiltrating it out of the agency. . Berulis also claimed that after DOGE members accessed the systems, an IP address in Russia attempted to log into the systems. Six days after Berulis filed his whistleblower disclosure to Congress, his car’s break lines were cut.
The NLRB’s Office of the Inspector General is continuing to investigate Berulis’ claims.related to their work with DOGE, Fox admitted that he had used an LLM to identify government contracts that used terms like “LGBTQ,” “tribal,” and “BIPOC” that appeared to indicate that they were related to diversity, equity, and inclusion. Fox also revealed that Armstrong, one of Special’s investors,that comprised some of the earliest DOGE teams, is now running a defense tech startup that appears to be positioning itself to receive government contracts.
Though Shaotran did not reply to WIRED’s questions about who was funding the startup, in an email viewed by WIRED, he described it as “backed by big names. ” DOGE, says Moynihan, appeared to have worked as an employment conveyor belt for many of the organization’s affiliates.
“It operated effectively as a place for people who wanted to get into venture capital networks to demonstrate their skills and loyalty to the owner class,” he says.is a senior writer for WIRED, covering platforms and power. She was previously a reporter at Rest of World, where she covered disinformation and labor in markets outside the US and Western Europe. She has worked with The New Humanitarian, Al Jazeera, and ProPublica. She is a graduate ...
A federal jury is now deciding whether Elon Musk will win his lawsuit against OpenAI and Sam Altman—but the trial has made everyone look bad. The email instructs workers to report behavior that predates Donald Trump’s second inauguration. One employee tells WIRED it felt like a “reminder to narc on your coworkers. ”Messages between Shivon Zilis and Tesla executives reveal plans in 2017 to start a rival AI lab, potentially led by Altman or Demis Hassabis.
Musk’s lawyers questioned Altman over allegations of deception and his network of financial investments, but the OpenAI CEO painted a picture of Musk as obsessed with controlling the company. The hackathon, held to build user-auditing tools for Palantir customers, comes as the company struggles to address employee concerns over its relationship with ICE.
, we dive into the IPO bonanza that the top AI companies are embarking on to the point where some real estate listings are looking for not just regular old cash, but Anthropic stock. Plus: Instructure’s Canvas ransomware debacle comes to a close, an alleged dark net market kingpin gets arrested, OpenAI workers fall victim to a supply chain attack, and more.
The nine-member panel took only two hours to return a verdict in favor of OpenAI on Monday, which the judge quickly adopted as her own final decision. The ex-employees, who cofounded a new AI watchdog group, say investors deserve more information about xAI’s safety practices before SpaceX goes public. Kenneth Wolfe organized the Department of Labor’s controversial prayer services before he was quietly appointed to lead a major agency office.
The long-awaited documents SpaceX filed with US regulators Wednesday included details about a lucrative deal to lend GPUs to a major AI rival.
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