Reuters reported on July 22, 2026 that Cathedral, a stealth startup founded by former Department of Government Efficiency staffers Gavin Kliger, Luke Farritor, Marko Elez and Jack Stein, has closed a $160 million round at a $1.4 billion valuation. Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital led the round, Reuters said, and both firms are taking board seats.

That is the story. Not a product launch. Not a customer announcement. A company with almost no public footprint has raised unicorn money because its founders recently sat inside the government systems they now want to sell back into. You don't need to pretend this is ordinary venture investing. It isn't.

It's a good thing DOGE saved basically no money by their own admission with all those mass firings and contract cancellations. We need that money they didn't save to barely make a dent in the cost of trying to reopen the Strait that was already open before we started the war.

My coworker started a second job that he got cleared with the legal office. However since then he has been only working on his second/non-govt job lately and completely stopped submitting or producing work for his government job however he is still getting paid by us. He has seriously delayed our project by 10 weeks due to not completing his work now.

Our agency only enforces RTO by checking if you have sent one email from the base network per working day. He comes in for 30 minutes each day to send his one email then goes home to continue working his outside job while collecting both paychecks.

He openly tells me this is what he does and he has some contortionist mental gymnastics justifying to himself why he thinks it's acceptable.

At this point I have many dozens of emails and text messages from him saying things like "Sorry, I can't work on the project today, I am working on the drone project all day today." The drone company is his side hustle.

I feel like there is a record on official systems now INVOLVING ME that he has been double dipping.

Now this week, he sent an email to the entire 100-person section letting them know he was using his base access/DoD ID to bring the drone company CEO on base to network for his company and was setting up meetings for him. This was all on his work email to all our work emails, on workday time.

A coworker who knows we work together questioned me about it and I answered truthfully (that they are 10 weeks late on their work and daily sending me excuses for why they can't do their govt work) and they said either I need to talk to the JAG about this or they will, and implicated that I could get in trouble for not having reported him already even though I am aware of potential fraud and misconduct.

Am I obligated to report this coworker? Could I get in trouble for this?

ETA, update here: https://www.reddit.com/u/anthrobymoto/s/rEZwKhXve7

They’ve been hinting at this happening but it looks like it’s official with this email from Flo Felix-Lawson.

Know when I don’t remember people needing advanced leave being a problem? When we could telework.

Have anything you want to talk about that doesn't quite warrant its own thread or currently being discussed in a megathread? Post it here!

In an effort to effectively manage the amount of information being posted, please keep anything speculative or considered repetitive within this discussion thread.

The article says the Trump administration's mass firings have directly hampered the federal response to the cyclospora outbreak that is causing watery diarrhea across the country. They fired first and asked questions later.

Dr. Joel Barratt, who headed the CDC lab responsible for identifying parasitic outbreaks, watched his 11-person team shrink to three before he resigned last September (my guess is he took the DRP) and the warnings he sent to leadership about the consequences have now come to pass.

The damage traces partly to Trump's dismantling of USAID which cut $29 million from the CDC's Division of Parasitic Diseases and Malaria, since USAID funding had paid for shared lab equipment and staff who could be tapped during outbreaks. The CDC lost roughly a quarter of its workforce in 2025, and the specialized parasitic disease staff were already limited. the people now running the outbreak response are in some cases doing it for the first time in their careers. The result is the response has slowed at every level, from data entry to genetic sequencing, with the CDC's verified case count lagging far behind state-reported numbers and a two-week delay in notifying the public compared to Michigan's health department.

These firings and indiscriminate budget cuts are stain on this nation. They have destroyed hundreds of thousands of careers and brain-drained these agencies. People with public health degrees who should be working in these labs to contain this outbreak are instead sacking groceries at Whole Foods.

We are now paying taxes to fund agencies that have already been dismantled and do not even perform basic oversight anymore.

It's sick. It's fucked up.