Elon Musk. Photo: Trevor Cokley/U.S. Air Force via Wikimedia Commons
Members of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency team may have triggered a “significant security breach” at the National Labor Relations Board, according to a whistleblower report made public on Tuesday.
Daniel Berulis, an NLRB technology staff member, alleged that beginning in early March, logging protocols created to audit users appeared to have been tampered with and that about 10 gigabytes worth of data had been removed from the agency’s network. "That kind of spike is extremely unusual, because data almost never directly leave NLRB's databases," he said.
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The group Whistleblower Aid provided an affidavit from Berulis to Sen. Tom Cotton, D-Ark., and Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Berulis wrote that within days of DOGE staffers arriving in early March, a series of “anomalous” events in the board’s computer systems began appearing, including changes to the use of multifactor authentication and the switching off of internal alerting systems.
Technical staff members were alarmed about what DOGE engineers did when they were granted access, according to an extensive investigation by NPR. The data that left the agency possibly included sensitive information about unions, ongoing legal cases and corporate secrets. Labor law experts interviewed by NPR said this information should almost never leave the NLRB and that it has nothing to do with making the government more efficient or cutting spending.
Meanwhile, according to the disclosure and records of internal communications, members of the DOGE team allegedly asked that their activities not be logged on the system and then appeared to attempt to cover their tracks by turning off monitoring tools and manually deleting records of their access. Berulis believes the suspicious activity warrants further investigation by agencies with more resources, such as the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency or the FBI.
"I can't attest to what their end goal was or what they're doing with the data," he told NPR. "But I can tell you that the bits of the puzzle that I can quantify are scary. This is a very bad picture we're looking at."
The NLRB said it would cooperate with any investigations that stem from Berulis' disclosure to Congress. "As an agency protecting employee rights, the NLRB respects its employee's right to bring whistleblower claims to Congress and the Office of Special Counsel, and the agency looks forward to working with those entities to resolve the complaints," said Tim Bearese, the agency's acting spokesperson.
In response to the NPR investigation, White House spokesperson Anna Kelly said, "It is months-old news that President Trump signed an executive order to hire DOGE employees at agencies and coordinate data sharing. Their highly-qualified team has been extremely public and transparent in its efforts to eliminate waste, fraud and abuse across the executive branch, including the NLRB."
A representative of DOGE did not respond to NPR's requests for comment.
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Alan Goforth
Alan Goforth is a freelance writer in suburban Kansas City. In addition to freelancing for several publications, he has written a dozen books about sports and other topics.
