NPR's cybersecurity correspondent Jenna McLaughlin recently broke a story about a whistleblower inside the federal government who says DOGE representatives appear to have taken sensitive data, then covered their tracks. Daniel Berulis works for the National Labor Relations Board and he has shared evidence that DOGE engineers disabled security protocols, exported reams of sensitive data and used a "hacker's toolkit" to hide their activities. And he thinks his agency is not alone. Today on The Sunday Story, what this possible breach could mean for the private data of millions of Americans.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
Chapter 1: Who is the whistleblower Daniel Berulis and what sparked his concerns?
I remember the moment vividly. I was at home, and I got a call from my boss saying, hey, My boss wants us to come in next week. It's possible Doge will show up.
On Monday, he sees a black SUV with a police escort pull into the parking garage at their office in D.C. Daniel didn't speak to anyone in the SUV, but he assumes it was members of the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOJ. He'd been hearing about DOJ showing up with police escorts around town, and based on that call with his boss, he was expecting them to arrive that day.
They didn't want to interface with us, the admins. They wanted system access to the cloud. That's what they were there for.
and access to the cloud they got. This is Berulis' whole job, to guard the sensitive data in the cloud of his agency. He works at the National Labor Relations Board, or NLRB, which is a small, independent federal agency that enforces the law to protect people from unfair labor practices, like when a corporation wants to illegally punish workers for organizing a union.
After the Doge team arrived, Barula saw one red flag after another, indicating that sensitive data at the NLRB was at risk. It scared him enough to come forward as a whistleblower. He filed a disclosure with Congress and he approached Jenna at NPR. Baruch's story gives us a rare look at what Doge was doing inside this agency and perhaps inside many others.
And also what that means for the sensitive data of millions of Americans. Jenna McLaughlin has covered cybersecurity for over a decade. Stephen Fowler is also with us. He's been focusing on the big picture of the federal government's restructuring under President Trump. Jenna and Stephen, thanks so much for being here.
Thank you.
Thanks for having us. So tell me a bit about this particular whistleblower at the NLRB. Like, who is he?
Yeah, I was lucky enough to speak to Barulis at length. You even got notes.
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Chapter 2: What unusual activities did the DOGE team perform at the NLRB?
It's important to say when we asked NLRB for comment on this story, they said they had no official record of Doge visiting, that they'd never authorized Doge accessing their systems, that Doge had never requested access. Of course, that's counter to Brulis' official disclosure, plus records of internal communication seen by NPR and the forensic evidence that we've been looking at.
It's really possible that this first visit and this request not to log access was outside senior leadership's awareness, that they didn't know about it.
Stephen, kind of help us zoom out a bit and put all of this into context. How is this different from how the federal government has historically operated?
So the big thing I want to talk about here is the Privacy Act. It was passed in 1974, and that's a lot of the backbone of these lawsuits challenging Doge's access. Congress decided 50 years ago that there shouldn't be this so-called God mode in government, and there shouldn't be the ability for politicians
Chapter 3: Why is not logging DOGE's access to systems a major red flag?
one person or a small group of people to be able to access virtually anything and everything about somebody that the federal government keeps. I mean, there's social security numbers, employment information, you've got immigration information, bank accounts.
The thing I want people to realize about this is that there is so much that we entrust to the federal government and federal agency data-wise that individually doesn't say that much. But now there are people affiliated with Doge that have access to that information and also have access to the Social Security Administration and your social security number and any statements and benefits.
And so even if they don't use it that way, we are now at a point where a small handful of people could build dossiers on people and do who knows what with it. And that's something that has concerned people across the ideological spectrum who are very much worried about privacy.
And so Doge is now inside the NLRB working without much oversight. What happens next?
Yeah, Aisha. So for the first couple of days, Berulis was continuing to do his job as normal. He went home on the weekend and then he noticed that this political reporter, Roger Sullenberger, tweeted about one of the Doge engineers and his public GitHub page. So basically, that's a place where you can host coding projects, collaborate with other people on that project.
And he noticed that a project was deleted or made private before he was able to figure out what it was. But the name was really interesting. The name of that project was NXGen B-Door Extract. NXGen is the name of an internal system that was designed specifically for the NLRB in-house, built just for them. And because of that name, Berlis was freaked out.
What is this file? Like, what is he looking at?
Yeah, every single person I talked to about this immediately just gasped. They were shocked that someone would actually call something this. Because the name B-Door essentially implies that you're building a backdoor or a way to get into a system that's not authorized. A possible way to extract information.
When I saw this tool, I... Immediately panicked. Just for lack of a better term, I kind of had a conniption and said, whoa, whoa, whoa.
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Chapter 4: What sensitive data does the NLRB hold that could be at risk?
If you've got insight into the opposing counsel's notes, you can probably come up with a pretty good response. Meanwhile, a foreign adversary or criminal hacker might be really interested in that data, too. They might hold it for ransom. They might learn more about their competitors' businesses or innovations.
And it's also possible that this data could be combined with some of the other sensitive sources of data that Stephen's been talking about to build a larger dossier on American citizens.
Steven, you've been covering Doge at large. Like, how does this complaint from this whistleblower fit into the larger story of what Doge as advisors are doing across the federal government?
So the National Labor Relations Board is just a small pocket inside the federal government. But we have some of the most detailed looks at what Doge is doing and how they're doing it because of this whistleblower and also because of more than a dozen lawsuits.
These are federal court cases that I'm tracking and a handful of agencies challenging how Doge has access to the sensitive data there and the fact that they even have access to the data at all. Individually, these cases paint isolated pictures about employee one having access to database one here and so on and so forth.
But we pulled all of these things together and found this pattern of a small number of Doge staffers being given access to virtually everything at all of these agencies that control just vast amount of data about millions and millions and millions of Americans.
When we come back, the whistleblower himself becomes the target of secret surveillance and threats.
I'm Jesse Thorne. This week on Bullseye, Fat Joe on being a late middle-aged rapper with an 18-year-old daughter. She's really looking at me like I'm a dinosaur. She's like, yo, dad, come on now. You going where? Stop. Just stay home. Watch Jeopardy. That's on the next Bullseye from MaximumFun.org and NPR.
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Chapter 5: What could be the consequences if this sensitive data is leaked or misused?
I went to, you know, obviously immediately try to validate that this was not legitimate copying. And so I first went to the dev team, validated that nobody was working on the systems at that time. It was like an early morning. So it did make sense for them anyway.
He confirmed no one at the NLRB had been saving backup files that week or migrating data for projects. And, you know, the timeline matched up. He essentially thought of it as, you know, even if Doge was not the one responsible for this, something unusual happened and it needs to be investigated. I spoke to Richard Griffin. He was the former NLRB general counsel from 2013 to 2017.
And he told me in an interview that none of that confidential and deliberative information should ever leave the agency.
So how much data are we talking about? Like, is it every file that the NLRB got? So it's not everything.
The data leaving was almost all text files. It added up to around 10 gigabytes. Think of that like the equivalent of a full stack of encyclopedias worth of pages if someone printed them. But it's possible the files that were extracted were compressed into a smaller package or that only some of the files were extracted. They could have searched for something specific.
When he realized this data was taken, what did Barulas do next?
Well, according to his disclosure, next thing he does is gather the troops. He got his IT team together to discuss possible insider threats, namely the Doge engineers. So this group of people eventually launched a formal breach investigation.
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Chapter 6: How does this whistleblower complaint fit into the bigger picture of the federal government and DOGE?
They were actually preparing a request for assistance outside their agency from the Department of Homeland Security's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. That's a mouthful. You can just call them CISA. They have more forensic tools to investigate potential breaches than the NLRB does. But ultimately, those efforts kind of just went quiet.
They were disrupted without an explanation from somewhere higher up, according to Brulis.
Instructions to drop it, to not file the report. It was one of those situations where it just, it bothered everybody that was involved in my agency and especially my department to do that. And so there was a lot of concern amongst us about that.
So, Aisha, I should also say that the NLRB told NPR that they did conduct an investigation into Brulis' claims. They said that they ruled out a breach. However, given the evidence in Brulis' disclosure that NPR reviewed, he argues that there's suspicious activity that should be investigated further. In the days after requesting the formal investigation, it got even scarier.
Brulis actually found a printed letter in an envelope taped to his door at home, a place he had only been living for two months, and that included a ton of sensitive personal information. It had photos of him walking his dog that appeared to be taken with a drone.
And, you know, when investigators and myself tried to follow this data trail and figure out where this could have come from, we could not find it even in the tools that journalists have access to to search through public records.
That's really scary. I mean, the idea of it seems like someone's watching him. Does he know or have any idea who left that letter?
It's terrifying, honestly. He doesn't know. Law enforcement is investigating as we speak. Right now, there's not clear, obvious suspects yet. But he's really scared because all of this really sensitive data, it was only available in his government file. He only recently updated it. He just moved like two months ago.
When we come back from the break, Jenna and Steven consider what else could be motivating Doge to access all this data.
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Chapter 7: What evidence did Daniel Berulis uncover indicating a potential data breach?
We're back with the Sunday story from Up First. We're talking with reporters Jenna McLaughlin and Stephen Fowler about a huge story that they've broken wide open after talking to a whistleblower at the National Labor Relations Board, or NLRB. So what are the consequences of the access that Doge has gained to these systems? What kind of vulnerabilities has Doge left in its wake?
So, Berulis can't confirm for sure, but he has reason to believe that there was potential malicious activity. According to his disclosure, there were multiple login attempts to the system from a Russian IP address that was using the new credentials that Doge appears to have created. So, Aisha, this happened within minutes of those new accounts being created.
Because of all this, experts told me that they could see the possibility that Doge has been compromised. I spoke to Russ Handorf. He's a former FBI cyber expert. He said malicious cyber actors, whether they're criminals or hackers working for Russia and China, might be really interested in getting inside the NLRB systems. And that's for a couple of reasons. First, we've heard U.S.
government officials sounding the alarm for years about stealing U.S. intellectual property to benefit their own industries and companies. It might also be valuable for blackmail purposes or to hold the data for ransom. But the thing about this is this cloud account could be connected to other government systems.
And Handorf said that it could be a way for a hacker to jump off from NLRB and go somewhere else.
Stephen, you mentioned earlier that there's no reason Doge needs to access the data at the NLRB for their stated mission, which is to deal with waste, fraud, and abuse. So why else might they want to collect it?
Yeah, it is worth mentioning that at a lot of these agencies that Doge has had access to data, there is a benefit of the doubt to understand why they would have it. For example, you know, at the Social Security Administration, they are looking at data to try to find evidence of people receiving benefits that they shouldn't have. This is nowhere like that.
It could be used for business purposes, especially if you're Elon Musk. His companies have several active cases before the NLRB. There's a group of former SpaceX employees that have lodged a complaint against Musk as an example. And Musk and SpaceX are part of a group of companies that have filed suit saying that the NLRB itself is unconstitutional.
So in theory, if this data was taken by somebody affiliated with Doge and given it to Elon Musk, he could have access to sensitive information about these cases that have been filed against his companies, used to target lawyers or witnesses or other people involved with the case. Also, it's stuff about his competitors.
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Chapter 8: What has NPR confirmed about the whistleblower's allegations?
So, Stephen, from what you're saying, it's like this story is likely bigger than just the NLRB. Since Doge has gained access to several agencies at this point, how have cybersecurity experts at other agencies responded?
Well, we have seen testimony in those federal court cases that I was talking about of people expressing alarm about how Doge had access to the data. But at the same time, there isn't really much of a response because many of these cybersecurity professionals have resigned, been forced out, relocated, put on administrative leave, taken the buyouts that have been offered.
So it's really hamstrung the ability to respond to or keep track of what Doge is doing. I'm thinking specifically of Erie Meyer, a technologist who stepped down after Doge did something similar at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Jenna talked to her for this story. She said,
Another employee at the Department of Interior sub agency who requested anonymity fearing retribution said their cyber teams are, quote, pissed because they have to sit on their hands when every single alarm system we have regarding insider threats is going off.
That's a lot of red flags. How has the administration reacted?
Trump issued an executive order that asked federal agencies to find ways to break down information silos and share non-classified data more easily across the federal agencies and to do so as applicable by law. But as we've seen here, their interpretation of what the law is is different from some of these experts.
And Aisha, the White House gave us a comment after we published. They said, essentially, it's old news that Doge is in federal agencies like the NLRB sharing data. They did not deny it.
So what else has happened since you broke the story last week?
Well, the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, ranking member Jerry Connolly of Virginia, is calling for an investigation into Doge's access to the NLRB to get some answers.
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