Earlier than she was chosen as Donald Trump’s newest nominee for Surgeon Normal, Dr. Casey Means got here from the world of healthcare startups – and cofounded one with a tech entrepreneur who’s now a key Division of Authorities Effectivity (DOGE) operative answerable for dismantling the IRS.
In 2019, Means, a holistic drugs physician who rose to prominence within the Trump-adjacent Make America Wholesome Once more motion (additionally referred to as MAHA), 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 linked to a $400-per-month subscription app, obtained tens of hundreds of thousands of {dollars} funding over the previous a number of years – notably from Andreessen-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 Andreessen, now a Trump advisor and a vital participant within the rise of the tech proper, stated in a press release announcing its Series A extension again in August 2024. “Ranges is a case examine of the appliance of expertise to each.”
Their affiliation is under no circumstances hidden: Corcos and Means each describe themselves as cofounders and at present energetic staff of Ranges on their LinkedIn pages, with Corcos listed as CEO. Additionally 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 infrequently 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 concerning the significance of metabolic well being,” Corcos posted on LinkedIn final October. “It’s superb to see the affect they’re having and the way they’ve introduced this urgent difficulty into the nationwide discourse.”
Means, now a detailed affiliate of Well being & Human Providers secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., was introduced as Trump’s nominee for Surgeon Normal after the president abruptly pulled his unique choose, Dr. Janette Nesheiwat, the day earlier than she was on account of testify in entrance of the Senate. Dr. Nesheiwat, 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 task broadly seen as punishment for including a journalist to a categorized group chat.)
Corcos, who can also be a particular advisor to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, has develop 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.) According to reports from Wired, behind the scenes, Corcos is answerable for efforts to consolidate all taxpayer information 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 enable any singular entity, together with personal firms and overseas governments, to entry and export stated information.
