Raw Story - 'This is very bad': Whistleblower reveals 'brazen' DOGE team looting sensitive labor data

Travis Gettys
April 15, 2025 8:17AM ET

A whistleblower has revealed that engineers with the Department of Government Efficiency had smuggled out highly sensitive data they had accessed from the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).

The DOGE employees arrived at the agency's headquarters in early March and immediately reviewed its data to ostensibly to maximize efficiency and identify costs to cut, but whistleblower Dan Berulis told Congress that technical staff members believed their actions within those sensitive systems looked like what criminal or state-sponsored hackers might do, reported NPR.

“The amount of data that was taken is the equivalent to a section of the New York Public Library, and the amount of people it could impact is in the hundreds of millions,” Berulis said. “Our information systems appear to have been assaulted and someone with the capacity and mandate to investigate needs to do so.”

The DOGE team may have been granted access to sensitive information on unions, ongoing legal cases and corporate secrets – all of which labor law experts say should never leave the agency – and the employees working under Elon Musk asked that their activities not be logged on the system and apparently tried to cover their tracks.

"I can't attest to what their end goal was or what they're doing with the data," Berulis told NPR. "But I can tell you that the bits of the puzzle that I can quantify are scary. ... This is a very bad picture we're looking at."

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