Two key alumni from the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), Nate Cavanaugh and Justin Fox, have transitioned directly from slashing federal waste to launching Special, a venture that applies similar AI-driven optimization to America's $10 trillion Main Street services economy. Having led DOGE's Small Agencies team and contributed to substantial estimated savings during their 2025 tenure under Elon Musk's oversight, the pair exited in September 2025 to build what they describe as 'DOGE for the private sector.'

Special is developing SpecialOS, an operating system fusing frontier AI models with custom tools to automate labor-intensive processes such as billing, scheduling, and insurance claims. Rather than selling software licenses, the company is pursuing aggressive vertical integration: acquiring and directly operating businesses in fragmented, inefficient industries heavily tied to government funding. Their inaugural vertical, Figure Health, targets senior care and has already closed its first acquisition—a Texas provider serving over 1,400 patients and employing hundreds of nurses. Plans include leveraging AI efficiencies to boost nurse compensation, alleviate staffing shortages, elevate care standards, and fully open-source Medicare and Medicaid billing claims for public scrutiny.

This approach reveals underreported second-order effects of the DOGE experiment. Insiders gained hands-on experience with AI for rapid waste detection (including early use of tools like ChatGPT for grant reviews), proprietary data on systemic inefficiencies, and high-level networks. Transferring these to the private sector—especially in taxpayer-supported domains like hospice, childcare, and elder care—creates a novel flywheel: internal government knowledge informs bespoke AI tooling, which is battle-tested through owned operations, generating transparent datasets that could further inform policy or expose fraud at scale. Backers including Andreessen Horowitz (lead), Musk ally Steve Davis, Coinbase founder Brian Armstrong, and Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar signal strong conviction in this builder-centric model.

The founders emphasize a philosophy honoring those 'in the arena' who drive societal progress, pledging allegiance to bold creators over bureaucracy. By focusing on highly unoptimized yet essential services, Special highlights how AI represents a generational lever for transforming both private delivery and the hidden costs borne by American taxpayers. This private-sector extension of DOGE principles may foreshadow broader migration of efficiency talent outward, potentially pressuring legacy operators while demonstrating scalable alternatives to top-down government reform.