The COsmic Foreground Explorer (COFE) is a balloon-borne microwave polarimeter designed to measure the low-frequency and low-ℓ characteristics of dominant diffuse polarized foregrounds. Short duration balloon flights from the Northern and Southern Hemispheres will allow the telescope to cover up to 80% of the sky with an expected sensitivity per pixel better than 100μK/deg 2 from 10GHz to 20GHz. This is an important effort toward characterizing the polarized foregrounds for future CMB experiments, in particular the ones that aim to detect primordial gravity wave signatures in the CMB polarization angular power spectrum.