Andreesen Horowitz is also sprinkling its fairy dust on a startup called Special, which “is building an operating system to transform critical American industries with AI,” whatever that means. Special’s founders, DOGE alumni Nate Cavanaugh and Justin Fox, pledge to run the company in “the spirit of DOGE.” They’re starting with health care, which is kind of alarming when you remember that “the spirit of DOGE” killed an estimated 781,343 people, of which 518,428 were children, when it shut down USAID.
Cavanaugh shows up on page two of Lewis’s book. “He was expecting me to jump to,” recalls Colin O’Brien, chief security officer at the United States Institute of Peace. O’Brien does not. “He had this air of superiority,” O’Brien tells Lewis. “You could feel him looking down on you.” Eventually Cavanaugh shows up with some D.C. cops who for some reason have decided that it’s legal for the federal government so make forced entry into the building of a private nonprofit that’s only partially funded by Congress. A district court judge disagrees with the cops’ conclusion, only to be overturned on appeal.
Cavanaugh reappears at the end of this chapter being interviewed on Fox News with Elon Musk. At Musk’s prompting, Cavanaugh cites as one of DOGE’s more scandalous findings that the Institute of Peace “had a $130,000 contract with a former member of the Taliban.” This is one of the more enraging passages in Lewis’s book. The former Talib, Mohammed Qasem Halimi, quit the Taliban after 9/11 (which happened when Cavanaugh was 5 years old) and became a United States ally—not a spy, exactly, per Lewis, but someone on whom the U.S. relied for important information. The Taliban, Lewis reports, tried to kill Halimi three times. He was evacuated when United States troops left Afghanistan. At the time of the Fox interview, Musk had identified Halimi by name in a tweet, essentially exposing, Lewis writes, “a U.S. asset to enemies of America.”
