A federal worker who works in Information Technology (IT) at the National Labor Relations Board has made a whistleblower complaint to the U.S. Congress, exposing unlawful hacking and data exfiltration by Elon Musk’s DOGE team.

“In the first days of March, a team of advisers from President Trump’s new Department of Government Efficiency initiative arrived at the Southeast Washington, D.C., headquarters of the National Labor Relations Board,” according to NPR.

“The small, independent federal agency investigates and adjudicates complaints about unfair labor practices. It stores reams of potentially sensitive data, from confidential information about employees who want to form unions to proprietary business information.

“The DOGE employees, who are effectively led by White House adviser and billionaire tech CEO Elon Musk, appeared to have their sights set on accessing the NLRB’s internal systems. They’ve said their unit’s overall mission is to review agency data for compliance with the new administration’s policies and to cut costs and maximize efficiency.

“But according to an official whistleblower disclosure shared with Congress and other federal overseers that was obtained by NPR, subsequent interviews with the whistleblower and records of internal communications, technical staff members were alarmed about what DOGE engineers did when they were granted access, particularly when those staffers noticed a spike in data leaving the agency. It’s possible that the data included sensitive information on unions, ongoing legal cases and corporate secrets — data that four labor law experts tell NPR should almost never leave the NLRB and that has nothing to do with making the government more efficient or cutting spending,” according to NPR.

“Meanwhile, according to the disclosure and records of internal communications, members of the DOGE team asked that their activities not be logged on the system and then appeared to try to cover their tracks behind them, turning off monitoring tools and manually deleting records of their access — evasive behavior that several cybersecurity experts interviewed by NPR compared to what criminal or state-sponsored hackers might do. …”

Berulis, the whistleblower, has documented a massive data breach and data exfiltration by the DOGE team.

“‘We are under assault right now,’ he remembered thinking.”

“When Berulis asked his IT colleagues whether they knew why the data was exfiltrated or whether anyone else had been using containers to run code on the system in recent weeks, no one knew anything about it or the other unusual activities on the network, according to his disclosure. In fact, when they looked into the spike, they found that logs that were used to monitor outbound traffic from the system were absent. Some actions taken on the network, including data exfiltration, had no attribution — except to a ‘deleted account,’ he continued. ‘Nobody knows who deleted the logs or how they could have gone missing,’ Berulis said.”

“The IT team met to discuss insider threats — namely, the DOGE engineers, whose activities it had little insight into or control over. ‘We had no idea what they did,’ he explained. Those conversations are reflected in his official disclosure.”

Elon Musk and his DOGE team have had illegitimate access to U.S. citizens’ data, potentially to advance political, corporate, or personal agendas. At the minimum, there are huge conflicts of interest and potential corruption here. More likely, this nefarious data access represents illegal hacking in violation of U.S. citizens’ privacy rights and constitutional rights.

The FBI should launch an immediate criminal investigation of the DOGE team’s data access at the NLRB and other federal agencies.

McLaughlin, Jenna. “A whistleblower’s disclosure details how DOGE may have taken sensitive labor data.” NPR (15 April 2025).