Former DOGE Officials Launch AI-Focused Startup With Backing From Andreessen Horowitz

Special, a newly launched holding company co-founded by former DOGE staffers Nate Cavanaugh and Justin Fox, has secured funding from Andreessen Horowitz and a network of Musk-aligned investors including Steve Davis, Antonio Gracias, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, and Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar. The company describes itself as building an AI operating system to acquire and transform inefficient American industries, starting with elder care through a subsidiary called Figure Health, which lists locations in Dallas, Miami, and Chicago but whose website contains broken links and images flagged as likely AI-generated. Fox and Cavanaugh frame their pitch around DOGE-era talking points, including references to alleged waste in Minnesota childcare and California hospice businesses—rhetoric critics note echoes politically charged justifications used to cut government programs and deploy immigration enforcement. During their DOGE tenure, the pair oversaw controversial actions including the near-transfer of the US Institute of Peace building, mass administrative leaves at multiple agencies, and the use of an LLM to flag grants containing terms like 'LGBTQ' and 'BIPOC' for elimination—actions that were later ruled unconstitutional in one case. Special's launch video notably clips a deposition in which Cavanaugh says DOGE did not actually reduce the federal deficit, a claim omitted from the edited version shown. Analysts and public policy experts have questioned whether DOGE's record—which independent analyses suggest saved less than 5 percent of its claimed figures while federal spending increased—constitutes a transferable model for private-sector transformation.