The Second Act of the DOGE Bro

Shooters shoot. Builders build. And DOGE alumni make splashy announcements about entering complex industries with scant qualifications while promising to “root out waste.”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.”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.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?I reached out to Fox and