In April 2025, an IT staffer at the National Labor Relations Board named Dan Berulis filed a whistleblower complaint with Congress alleging that DOGE members had accessed and possibly exfiltrated sensitive agency data. By his account, DOGE demanded “tenant owner” accounts with “essentially unrestricted permission to read, copy, and alter data,” a level of access beyond the agency's own chief information officer. Days after filing, Berulis found the brakes on his car had been cut. The NLRB's inspector general opened an investigation that remains ongoing.
In April 2026 the Government Accountability Office published its own report, titled “National Labor Relations Board Detailees Did Not Access IT Systems Between April 16 and July 25, 2025.” The title reads like an exoneration. It covers only the window immediately after Berulis blew the whistle, and says nothing about DOGE's activity before that.
The more important finding is in the footnotes. In August 2025, after DOGE members left the NLRB but before GAO investigators asked to observe the systems, the agency “deleted the team member accounts for system access.” The digital records of what DOGE touched, and when, were erased, leaving GAO no way to verify what NLRB staff told them. “I think you could imagine another situation where the footnote is the central theme of the report,” said University of Michigan public policy professor Don Moynihan. “The report raises more questions than it resolves, such as who deleted the data.”
Federal records rules require that logs for systems “requiring special accountability for access” be kept six years, and the two systems GAO says DOGE reached both hold federal employees' personal information. The NLRB matters here for a specific reason: it investigates unfair labor practices, holds whistleblower identities and trade secrets, and had open cases against Tesla and SpaceX, both owned by DOGE's leader, Elon Musk. The agency later dropped its SpaceX case (see A DOGE Whistleblower Sues Musk for Defamation Over a Post Calling a False Whistleblower Claim 'a Serious Crime' and Trump Gives Musk, Whose Companies Hold More Than $300 Billion in Federal Contracts, Power to Slash Spending).