On April 14, 2025, a federal IT staffer filed a whistleblower complaint with Congress alleging that members of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) had accessed and possibly exfiltrated sensitive information from the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).
Just days after filing the complaint, Dan Berulis, the whistleblower, found the brakes on his car had been cut after getting into a minor accident near his home. The complaint, which went public in an NPR story the day after it was filed, caused an outcry, with members of Congress calling for an investigation. The following month, in May 2025, FedScoop reported that the NLRB’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) opened an investigation. It remains ongoing.
In April 2026, though, the Government Accountability Office (GAO)—a federal agency within the legislative branch that performs audits and investigations for Congress— published its own report about DOGE’s access to the NLRB’s systems, titled “National Labor Relations Board Detailees Did Not Access IT Systems Between April 16 and July 25, 2025.” The report conspicuously only covers the time period immediately following Berulis’ complaint, and does not address any DOGE activity before that point.
But nested in the footnotes of the report is another revelation: In August 2025, shortly after DOGE members left the NLRB but before the GAO’s investigators “requested to observe the systems,” the agency “deleted the team member accounts for system access after the agreement to detail DOGE team staff had expired.” Basically, this means that the digital records of what data and systems DOGE members accessed and when had been eliminated, leaving the GAO no way to confirm what NLRB staff told their investigators.
“I think you could imagine another situation where the footnote is the central theme of the report,” says Don Moynihan, a professor of public policy at the University of Michigan. “The report raises more questions than it resolves, such as who deleted the data.”
The NLRB enforces laws concerning unions and collective bargaining, and investigates unfair labor practices. This gives it access to the identities of whistleblowers as well as their testimony; information about trade secrets and other proprietary data that might be important in issues related to negotiations between employers and employees; and a wide variety of investigative materials.
According to Berulis’ whistleblower complaint, “DOGE officials required the highest level of access and unrestricted access to internal systems. They were to be given what are referred to as ‘tenant owner’ level accounts, with essentially unrestricted permission to read, copy, and alter data”—a level of access beyond that of the agency’s chief information officer.
In the report, GAO officials note that they “interviewed NLRB staff regarding what level of access they provided for each system to the DOGE team,” but were unable to confirm whether what they were told was true because the DOGE accounts and associated information had already been deleted from the NLRB’s systems. It’s also not clear exactly who from DOGE had access: Justin Fox, Nate Cavanaugh, and Jordan Wick were all at one point at the NLRB, but no specific DOGE members are named in the report nor in Berulis’ original whistleblower complaint.
The NLRB did not respond to a request for comment; neither did Fox, Cavanaugh, or Wick.
Tesla and SpaceX, both companies owned by Elon Musk, who also led DOGE, have been the subject of NLRB investigations. Earlier this year, the NLRB dropped the case against SpaceX, saying that the agency didn’t have jurisdiction over the company.
In an April statement announcing an investigation into the case’s dismissal, Democratic senators Elizabeth Warren and Richard Blumenthal wrote: “Given Musk’s extraordinary financial support for President Trump in the 2024 election, his substantial influence in the Trump Administration and interest in the NLRB’s work as head of [DOGE] … we seek answers to determine if the decision to drop the case may have been based on political considerations rather than the facts at hand.”
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