The ill-fated Department of Government Efficiency didn’t actually save the American taxpayers any money, but that doesn’t mean that it didn’t accomplish anything. For instance, it seems at least some of them figured out that there is a lot of money to be made by securing contracts with the Pentagon. According to a report from Reuters, a startup founded by several former DOGE employees just completed a funding round that values their company at $1.4 billion.
Fun fact: did you know DOGE was officially sunsetted on July 4th? It came and went with little fanfare because, after an initial dismantling of the “wokest” government agencies and seemingly blindly eliminating any contract that contained any word they didn’t like without actually reviewing it, it just kinda stopped. Despite claiming to have saved more than $55 billion through its “review” process, experts put the figure closer to $7 billion when they’re being generous and $1 billion when they’re being realistic.
But now some of the agency’s former staffers are positioning themselves to pull in more money than they ever saved. Per Reuters, the ex-Elon Musk acolytes just closed a funding round for Cathedral, their military-targeted startup, that raised $160 million from the usual suspects, including Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital.
It’s not even particularly hard at this point to identify the friendly dealings happening around this administration. Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz each donated $2.5 million to a pro-Trump super PAC. Several Sequoia Capital execs contributed to Trump, as well. They’ve repeatedly gotten favorable decisions out of the Trump administration. They’ve got such deep ties that they’ve created step-by-step guides for their startups on how to secure government contracts. You could call the Trump administration a tangled web of self-enriching assholes, but it’s not that tangled—it’s more of a straight line from one to the other.
You can probably expect Cathedral to be the next to cash in. Per Reuters, the company of former DOGE alumni is selling AI software designed to bolster the military’s offensive and defensive cybersecurity capabilities meant to attack and deter foreign adversaries. With newfound scrutiny from the Trump administration aimed at Chinese AI companies, they’ve probably got some willing buyers in the Pentagon waiting for them.
The Cathedral boys also probably had a good idea that the money would be there. While DOGE did eventually get its grubby paws on the Pentagon’s budget, it didn’t do much cutting. As was the case with most of its dealings across the federal government, it mostly just cut people’s jobs while the actual agency budget has increased. More money to spend and fewer people to spend it on means contracting out more work. And no one would better know the opportunity to cash in than the people who helped create it.
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