New surgeon general nominee cofounded a16z backed health app with DOGE operative

Before she was chosen as Donald Trump’s latest nominee for Surgeon General, Dr. Casey Means came from the world of healthcare startups – and cofounded one with a tech entrepreneur who’s now a key DOGE operative in charge of dismantling the IRS.

In 2019, Means, a holistic medicine doctor who rose to prominence in the Trump-adjacent MAHA movement, launched Levels, a biowearables and health-tracking company, with Sam Corcos, who’s now leading efforts at DOGE to construct a “mega API” that compiles American taxpayers’ data. The company, whose first product was a blood glucose tracker connected to a $400-per-month subscription app, received tens of millions of dollars funding over the past several years – notably from Andreesen-Horowitz’s venture capital arm a16z, which led its $12 million seed round and its Series A round.

“Both the health of our people and the fiscal solvency of our country are at stake,” Marc Andreesen, now a Trump advisor and a critical player in the rise of the tech right, said in a press release announcing its Series A extension back in August 2024. “Levels is a case study of the application of technology to both.”

Their affiliation is by no means hidden: Corcos and Means both describe themselves as cofounders and currently active employees of Levels on their LinkedIn pages, with Corcos listed as CEO. They also have a joint authors page on the Levels blog, frequently co-hosted a company podcast, are mentioned in press releases about the company, and often highlighted each others’ works on their social media feeds. “Super proud to share that Levels Co-founder, Casey Means, MD, along with her brother, Calley Means, sat down with Joe Rogan to talk about the importance of metabolic health,” Corcos posted on LinkedIn last October. “It’s amazing to see the impact they’re having and how they’ve brought this pressing issue into the national discourse.”

Means, now a close associate of HHS secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., was announced as Trump’s nominee for Surgeon General after the president abruptly pulled his original pick, Dr. Janette Nesheiwat, the day before she was due to testify in front of the Senate. Dr. Nesheiwatt, a former Fox News contributor, also happens to be the sister-in-law of former National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, who had fallen out of favor with the White House for his role in Signal-gate. (Last week, Trump announced that he was reassigning Waltz to be his Ambassador to the United Nations, a role widely seen as punishment for adding a journalist to a classified group chat.)

Corcos, who is also a special advisor to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, has become a public-facing figure in stories about DOGE, the quasi-governmental agency led by Elon Musk to drastically reduce the federal government’s workforce. (Disclaimer: This reporter attended college with Corcos at Claremont McKenna College.) According to reports from Wired, behind the scenes, Corcos is in charge of efforts to consolidate all taxpayer data into one single database, a move that has alarmed security analysts and IRS engineers – both for the speed at which DOGE is doing it, and because a “mega API” project would allow any singular entity, including private companies and foreign governments, to access and export said data.