Earlier than she was chosen as Donald Trump’s newest nominee for Surgeon Common, 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 accountable for dismantling the IRS.
In 2019, Means, a holistic medication 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 construct a “mega API” that compiles American taxpayers’ data. The corporate, whose first product was a blood glucose tracker related to a $400-per-month subscription app, acquired tens of hundreds of thousands 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 crucial participant within the rise of the tech proper, mentioned in a press release announcing its Series A extension again in August 2024. “Ranges is a case research of the appliance of know-how to each.”
Their affiliation is on no account hidden: Corcos and Means each describe themselves as cofounders and presently lively workers of Ranges on their LinkedIn pages, with Corcos listed as CEO. In addition they have a joint authors page on the Ranges weblog, frequently co-hosted a company podcast, are talked about in press releases about the company, and sometimes highlighted every others’ works on their social media feeds. “Tremendous proud to share that Levels Co-founder, Casey Means, MD, alongside together with her brother, Calley Means, sat down with Joe Rogan to speak in regards to the significance of metabolic well being,” Corcos posted on LinkedIn final October. “It’s wonderful to see the impression they’re having and the way they’ve introduced this urgent challenge into the nationwide discourse.”
Means, now an in depth affiliate of HHS secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., was introduced as Trump’s nominee for Surgeon Common after the president abruptly pulled his authentic choose, Dr. Janette Nesheiwat, the day earlier than she was as a result of 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 broadly seen as punishment for including a journalist to a labeled group chat.)
Corcos, who can 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 cut back the federal authorities’s workforce. (Disclaimer: This reporter attended school with Corcos at Claremont McKenna Faculty.) According to reports from Wired, behind the scenes, Corcos is accountable for efforts to consolidate all taxpayer information into one single database, a transfer that has alarmed safety analysts and IRS engineers – each for the velocity at which DOGE is doing it, and since a “mega API” challenge would permit any singular entity, together with personal firms and international governments, to entry and export mentioned information.