Hegseth and Rubio filed an undated resolution to remove USIP’s acting president, Kenneth Jackson (an administrator who had previously helped to tear down the U.S. Agency for International Development), as well as its chief financial and operating officers. The document declared the appointment of DOGE staffer Nate Cavanaugh to the acting president role. The secretaries wrote that Cavanaugh would have “the authority and is instructed to transfer USIP’s assets, including USIP’s real property and rights thereof, and including all assets recently received from the Endowment, to the General Services Administration.” The GSA, an organizational agency where Cavanaugh draws an annual salary of $120,500 — almost as much as employees who have worked there for more than a decade — is one of the places where DOGE has concentrated its power over the federal bureaucracy. DOGE is even attempting to seize USIP’s $500 million headquarters for itself via the GSA, according to a Wired report.
Cavanaugh’s résumé is not without impressive items (though his complete lack of government experience does not compare favorably to [USIP CEO George] Moose’s nearly five decades of diplomacy work, beginning when he joined the U.S. Foreign Service in 1967). Even before Cavanaugh enrolled in college, he has said in an interview, he planned to drop out and become a tech entrepreneur as soon as possible. In his one year at the University of Indiana Bloomington — he chose the school because he wanted to follow in billionaire Mark Cuban’s footsteps — he founded the esports tournament platform Guuf and sold it after leaving higher education behind.
Since then, Cavanaugh has co-founded FlowFi, a financial services platform that connects small businesses with accounting and tax experts, a company that helped land him on the Forbes “30 Under 30” list of young entrepreneurs in 2021. But his previous venture is perhaps more revealing. Brainbase, which he also co-founded, used artificial intelligence tools to track intellectual property through trademarks on copyright.
Cavanaugh’s social media footprint reveals that he is closely aligned with the moguls who have cast their lot with Trump. “I look to Peter Thiel for a lot of my thinking and modeling about the world and business.”
All told, Cavanaugh’s online presence suggests a confident young man with a worldview completely captured by Silicon Valley’s self-mythologizing, the belief that tech entrepreneurs are uniquely qualified to make decisions for everyone else, and the assumption that the rich and powerful in that industry have universally earned their privilege — as opposed to to anyone who might have benefited from considerations of diversity, equity, and inclusion. L
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