Elon Musk’s DOGE Isn’t Stopping Fraud. It’s Making It Easier.
What is abundantly clear from what DOGE has done so far is that its main goal isn’t to cut the deficit but to benefit tech oligarchs like Musk. Far from meeting its mandate to reduce fraud and abuse, DOGE is best understood as an effort to defraud Americans themselves. Now there’s evidence that the group has stolen sensitive personal information.
On Tuesday, NPR published a shocking report based on testimony from a whistleblower at the National Labor Relations Department, Daniel Berulis. In early March, DOGE showed up at the NLRB’s door. Soon after, technical staff grew “alarmed about what DOGE engineers did when they were granted access, particularly when those staffers noticed a spike in data leaving the agency. It’s possible that the data included sensitive information on unions, ongoing legal cases and corporate secrets.”
A spokesperson from the NLRB has denied the whistleblower’s explosive report, which has been shared with Congress, saying a subsequent review “determined that no breach of agency systems occurred.” But Berulis’s report contains forensic data pointing toward a breach—and 11 of his colleagues have backed him up, telling NPR they have “seen other evidence that DOGE is exfiltrating sensitive data for unknown reasons.”