New surgeon basic nominee cofounded a16z backed well being app with DOGE operative
Earlier than she was chosen as Donald Trump’s newest nominee for Surgeon Basic, Dr. Casey Means got here from the world of healthcare startups – and cofounded one with a tech entrepreneur who’s now a key DOGE operative in command of dismantling the IRS.
In 2019, Means, a holistic drugs physician who rose to prominence within the Trump-adjacent MAHA motion, launched Ranges, a biowearables and health-tracking firm, with Sam Corcos, who’s now main efforts at DOGE to assemble a “mega API” that compiles American taxpayers’ knowledge. The corporate, whose first product was a blood glucose tracker linked to a $400-per-month subscription app, obtained tens of tens of millions of {dollars} funding over the previous a number of years – notably from Andreesen-Horowitz’s enterprise capital arm a16z, which led its $12 million seed spherical and its Sequence A spherical.
“Each the well being of our folks and the fiscal solvency of our nation are at stake,” Marc Andreesen, now a Trump advisor and a important participant within the rise of the tech proper, stated in a press launch saying its Sequence A extension again in August 2024. “Ranges is a case examine of the applying of expertise to each.”
Their affiliation is on no account hidden: Corcos and Means each describe themselves as cofounders and presently lively staff of Ranges on their LinkedIn pages, with Corcos listed as CEO. In addition they have a joint authors web page on the Ranges weblog, steadily co-hosted an organization podcast, are talked about in press releases concerning the firm, and infrequently highlighted every others’ works on their social media feeds. “Tremendous proud to share that Ranges Co-founder, Casey Means, MD, alongside together with her brother, Calley Means, sat down with Joe Rogan to speak concerning the significance of metabolic well being,” Corcos posted on LinkedIn final October. “It’s wonderful to see the affect they’re having and the way they’ve introduced this urgent situation into the nationwide discourse.”
Means, now a detailed affiliate of HHS secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., was introduced as Trump’s nominee for Surgeon Basic after the president abruptly pulled his unique choose, Dr. Janette Nesheiwat, the day earlier than she was attributable to testify in entrance of the Senate. Dr. Nesheiwatt, a former Fox Information contributor, additionally occurs to be the sister-in-law of former Nationwide Safety Advisor Mike Waltz, who had fallen out of favor with the White Home for his function in Sign-gate. (Final week, Trump introduced that he was reassigning Waltz to be his Ambassador to the United Nations, a job extensively seen as punishment for including a journalist to a labeled group chat.)
Corcos, who can also be a particular advisor to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, has turn into a public-facing determine in tales about DOGE, the quasi-governmental company led by Elon Musk to drastically scale back the federal authorities’s workforce. (Disclaimer: This reporter attended school with Corcos at Claremont McKenna School.) Based on stories from Wired, behind the scenes, Corcos is in command of efforts to consolidate all taxpayer knowledge into one single database, a transfer that has alarmed safety analysts and IRS engineers – each for the pace at which DOGE is doing it, and since a “mega API” venture would permit any singular entity, together with non-public firms and overseas governments, to entry and export stated knowledge.
