Musk Connections: N/A
Other Corporate Connections: Founder of Russell Street Ventures, Co-founder of Aspire Health, Co-founder of CareBridge, Co-founder of Main Street Health.
DOGE Deployments: HHS
Brad Smith Is Reportedly Steve Davis’ Right Hand Man
- Smith has been reported to be working closely with Steve Davis to oversee DOGE’s operations. He has been spotted at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
In Trump 1.0, Smith Advocated For Industry-Friendly Insurance Policies
- Brad Smith served in Trump’s first administration. He was the Director of the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Innovation, (CMMI). CMMI experimented with alternative payment models often in conjunction with large healthcare insurance companies such as UnitedHealth, Aetna and Molina.
- CMMI spent $10 billion over a decade searching for schemes to purportedly reduce healthcare costs that mostly subscribed to a “value-based care” model. This model claims the “central flaw of American health care is ‘volume-based’ fee-for-service compensation schemes that incentivize ‘overutilization’ of the health care system,” and therefore attempts to incentivize providers to engage in more preventative care and otherwise offer more “valuable” care that can cut down on “overutilization” of services. Often, federal funding is dispatched to a network of private intermediaries or to healthcare providers to help them find areas to reduce overutilization.
Smith Helped Manage Trump 1.0’s Lopsided Pandemic Response And Public-Private Partnerships
- Smith was on the board of Operation Warp Speed, Trump’s Covid-19 vaccine development and distribution program.
- During the initial stage of the pandemic, Smith “became closely involved” in coordinating “Project Airbridge,” a public-private partnership program instituted to help transport medical supplies shortly after the outbreak.
- A GAO audit from 2023 found that Project Airbridge suffered from a severe lack of oversight. “We could only confirm distributors delivered 35 percent of Airbridge PPE to designated healthcare facilities in prioritized locations instead of the 50 percent minimum required by FEMA […] FEMA paid to transport PPE that may not have been necessary to meet distributors’ needs and was not always delivered to locations most in need. Accordingly, the project’s $238 million may have been better spent on other COVID-19 initiatives.”
- Smith and Trump allies, such as Jared Kushner, pressed the FDA to expedite an approval for an experimental blood plasma treatment for Covid-19 ahead of the 2020 Republican National Convention. The NIH had still been conducting analyses on the safety of the treatment, and publicly objected to approving it too early.
- At the time of its approval by the Trump administration, the blood plasma treatment had not yet been tested with randomized trials. Additionally, right before Trump announced his FDA had approved the treatment, new data from Mayo Clinic trials that had been run turned out to have missing entries. During the announcement, Trump’s FDA chief Stephen Hahn “misinterpreted agency data and claimed that plasma reduced the mortality rate of Covid-19 patients by 35 percent — a substantial exaggeration of what the research actually showed.”
- In 2021, the World Health Organization recommended against the use of blood plasma to treat COVID-19. They only approved its continued use in trials for severe and critically ill cases
Brad Smith Operates An Investment Firm Named Russell Street Ventures, And Has Founded And Sold A Number Of Healthcare Companies For Billions Of Dollars
- Brad Smith founded Aspire Health in 2013, which he sold to Anthem for $440 million in 2018.
- Aspire was fined $115,000 by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in 2020. The company fired a worker in 2015 for exhausting her medical leave from a workplace injury. “The employee’s doctor cleared her to work without restrictions shortly thereafter, and, in August 2018, the employee applied for a position within Aspire’s Village House program. Hours before her interview, the former employee was notified that she was ineligible for rehire at Aspire due to medical records in her prior workers’ compensation file.”
- In 2018, Brad Smith started an investment firm, “part private equity firm and part incubator,” Russell Street Ventures, to invest in healthcare companies.
- Through Russell Street Ventures, he started a medicaid home health intermediary called CareBridge in 2019. He sold CareBridge to Elevance in October 2024 for $2.7 billion.
- CareBridge was the subject of a class action lawsuit in January 2025 for overworking its employees. Evidence of abusive working conditions at the company have been reinforced by “dozens” of negative reviews on job sites.
- Through Russell Street Ventures, he launched a rural “value-based care” company called Main Street Health in 2021. Main Street announced $315 million in financing in 2023.
As Elon Musk’s DOGE continues to tear through agencies with little oversight or transparency, the Revolving Door Project is publishing profiles of reported DOGE employees: who they are, where they came from, and any conflicts of interest that might make their unfettered access to the federal government dangerous to the public. Read them all here.