NLRB Breach Impacts Labor Cases, Proprietary Information
April 16, 2025—A U.S. federal worker came forward this week as a whistleblower against the Department of Government Efficiency, DOGE, the broad-reaching initiative President Trump created with an executive order on his first day of office.
The whistleblower, Daniel Berulis, is an IT worker at the National Labor Relations Board. NLRB is a small, independent government agency tasked with ensuring that private-sector workers have rights such as collective bargaining in their workplaces.
Berulis asserts that DOGE employees not only overrode standard security procedures to protect sensitive data, but they also made the system vulnerable to disclosure to a foreign adversary.
Log-In Attempt from Russia
Berulis noted that within minutes after DOGE employees created usernames and passwords to access the system, a device with an IP address in Russia used one of the newly created login credentials to attempt to access the data.
Data Disclosure
The data that NLRB houses includes proprietary information about U.S. businesses, pending cases, witness testimony, and personal material about union members and employees. It is protected under federal privacy laws. Although the data is protected by several federal laws, DOGE workers demanded unrestricted access. Furthermore, systems in place to protect the data from unauthorized disclosure were disabled.
Berulis told NPR he saw “saw around 10 gigabytes of data leave NLRB’s network — or the equivalent of a full stack of encyclopedias if someone printed them.”
NLRB’s Labor Investigations
The federal labor board, NLRB, currently has over 26,000 open cases. It includes an investigative case history of over a dozen companies, including Bridgewater Associates, Google, Lyft, the NFL, Tesla, Trump Companies, Volkswagen, and Walmart. These include nine open cases against Tesla, co-founded and led by Elon Musk, whom is also overseeing DOGE as a senior advisor to Trump.
Starlink Extraction of Data
Also of note and concern for U.S. policymakers is that DOGE is using Starlink to extract data, Andrew Bakaj, Berulis’s attorney told CNN this week.
