On April 14, 2025, a federal IT worker presented a whistleblower complaints by Congress for allegedly being members of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) they had accessed and possibly leaked 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 he had been cut after having a minor accident near his home. complaint, which go public in an NPR story the day after it was presented, it caused an outcry, and members of Congress want an investigation to be done. The following month, May 2025, FedScoop reported that the NLRB’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) opened an investigation. It continues.
In April 2026, the Government Accountability Office (GAO)—a federal agency within the legislative branch that conducts audits and investigations of Congress— published its report about DOGE’s access to NLRB systems, titled “Statement of National Labor Relations Board Access to Information Systems Between April 16 and July 25, 2025.” The report only covers the time period immediately after Berulis’ complaint, and does not address any of DOGE’s activities prior to that point.
But listed in the report’s footnotes is another revelation: In August 2025, shortly after DOGE members left the NLRB but before GAO investigators “requested to examine the systems,” the agency “deleted team members’ accounts for system access after the DOGE team’s employee disclosure agreement expired.” Basically, this means that the digital record of what data and systems DOGE members found and when was removed, leaving the GAO no way to verify what the NLRB staff told their investigators.
“I think you can think of another situation where the footnote is the main topic of the report,” says Don Moynihan, a professor of public policy at the University of Michigan. “The report raises more questions than it solves, such as who deleted the data.”
The NLRB enforces laws governing unions and collective bargaining, and investigates unfair labor practices. This gives access to the identity of informants as well as their testimony; information about trade secrets and other proprietary data that may be relevant in matters related to negotiations between employers and employees; and a variety of survey materials.
According to Berulis’ whistleblower complaint, “DOGE officials required the highest level of access and unrestricted access to internal systems. They were to be granted so-called ‘tenant owner’ level accounts, with essentially unlimited permission to read, copy, and change data”—a level of access beyond that of the agency’s chief information officer.
In the report, GAO officials note that they “questioned NLRB staff about the level of access they provided to each system for the DOGE team,” but could not confirm whether what they were told was true because DOGE accounts and related information had already been deleted from NLRB systems. It’s also unclear exactly who from DOGE had access: Justin Fox, Nate Cavanaugh, and Jordan Wick were all at one time on the NLRB, but no specific members of DOGE were named in the report nor in Berulis’ original whistleblower complaint.
The NLRB did not respond to a request for comment; nor Fox, Cavanaugh, or Wick.
Tesla and SpaceX, both companies owned by Elon Musk, who also chaired DOGE, have been the subject of an NLRB investigation. Earlier this year, the NLRB dismissed the case against SpaceX, arguing that the agency had no jurisdiction over the company.
In April statement announcing the dismissal of the case, Democratic senators Elizabeth Warren and Richard Blumenthal wrote: “Given Musk’s extraordinary financial support for President Trump in the 2024 election, his strong influence in the Trump Administration and interest in the work of the NLRB as head of (DOGE) …
