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A whistleblower complaint alleges that a team of technologists associated with billionaire Elon Musk may have been responsible for a significant cybersecurity breach at the US federal labor watchdog, potentially compromising sensitive case files.
The complaint, which was made public on Tuesday by the group Whistleblower Aid, is based on the testimony of Daniel Berulis, an IT staffer at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). The NLRB is a New Deal-era agency that protects workers’ rights to organize and join unions and has been a target of corporate titans, including Musk, who are seeking to have the agency’s powers declared unconstitutional.
In an affidavit, Berulis stated that he had evidence that DOGE staffers were given unusually broad access to the NLRB’s systems, which house sensitive case files. He claimed that logging protocols created to audit users appeared to have been tampered with, and that he had detected the removal of approximately 10 gigabytes of data from the NLRB’s network.
Berulis told Reuters in an interview that the compromised data includes proprietary business information from competitors, union organization, and unfair labor practice respondents and their claims, including private affidav! He stated that the data removal was extremely unusual, as data rarely leaves the NLRB’s databases directly.
A spokesperson for Musk’s team, officially known as U.S. DOGE Service, did not immediately return a message seeking comment. The NLRB also did not immediately return a message, although an NLRB spokesperson was quoted by NPR as disputing Berulis’ claims and stating that there had been no breach. Republican Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Tom Cotton and his Democratic counterpart Mark Warner did not immediately return messages seeking comment.
Berulis alleged in his affidavit that there were attempted logins to NLRB systems from a Russian IP address in the days following DOGE’s access to the systems. He told Reuters that the attempted logins included correct username and password combinations but were rejected due to location-related conditional access policies.
Berulis’ affidavit stated that an effort by him and his colleague to formally investigate and alert the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) was disrupted by higher-ups without explanation. As he and his colleagues prepared to pass information to CISA, he received a threatening note taped to the door of his home, including photographs taken via drone, according to Andrew Bakaj, Whistleblower Aid’s chief legal counsel.
Berulis expressed concern about the reprisal, stating that data traditionally safeguarded with high standards in the US government was being taken, and those trying to stop it were being removed one by one. Bakaj declined to share the note with Reuters, and the FBI declined to comment.
A message left with CISA was not immediately returned.
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