It was supposed to be just another government efficiency sweep. Turns out, it was a digital vanishing act.
Dan Berulis knew something was off. An IT staffer at the National Labor Relations Board, he saw folks from the so-called “Department of Government Efficiency” getting keys to the kingdom. Way more than they needed. Way more than the Chief Information Officer had. He filed a whistleblower complaint with Congress in April 2025. He alleged they accessed sensitive union data. Maybe copied it.
Then the brakes on his car were cut.
“DOGE officials required… tenant owner level accounts.”
Minor accident. Major red flag. NPR picked it up. Congress screamed for an investigation. The NLRB Inspector General opened one in May 2025.
Fast forward to April 2026.
The Government Accountability Office dropped a report. The title looked safe. Almost boring. “National Labor Relations Board Detaileees Did Not Access IT Systems Between April 16 and July 25, 2025.”
Notice the dates? They start right after Berulis blew the whistle. The report claims no access during that specific window. Clean. Neat.
But check the footnotes.
Right before investigators arrived in August 2025 to look at the logs, someone hit delete. The team accounts for DOGE staffers? Gone. Wiped clean. No logs of who logged in. No records of what they touched.
“The footnote is the central theme of this report,” says Don Moyninan. “It raises more questions than it resolves.”
Who pressed the button? Why did they erase the digital history of people who had unrestricted power to read, copy, or alter federal data?
The NLRB holds secrets. Whistleblower identities. Trade secrets. Union strategies. If Elon Musk’s efficiency crew wanted leverage, the NLRB was a gold mine. Tesla and SpaceX have both faced unfair labor practice claims from this agency. SpaceX got out of theirs earlier this year. A sudden loss of jurisdiction. Coincidence? Senator Elizabeth Warren doesn’t think so.
Jessica Baxter from the GAO defends the report. “Our work is always nonpartisan,” she says. Sure. But their title ignores the elephant in the server room. By only looking at the weeks after the complaint, they missed the weeks before. And they can’t confirm the “before” part because the data is gone.
Here is the law on this:
- Six Years: Records with personally identifiable info must stay for six years under the General Records Schedule.
- FOIA Freeze: If a request is pending, you can’t shred the paper—or wipe the digital files—until it’s resolved.
- Special Accountability: These were systems requiring strict access logs. They are not junk mail.
Deleting them is illegal. Dan McGrath from Democracy Forward calls it “deeply concerned.” He argues it violates the Federal Records Act flat out. You can’t destroy evidence because it looks bad. Or because someone in power wanted it buried.
WIRED found DOGE members using Signal with auto-delete settings. Convenient for privacy. Terrible for compliance.
Michael Duff, a law professor who worked at the NLRB decades ago, calls this deletion “irregular.” Almost certainly against practice. And doing it during an ongoing investigation? That’s not just messy. That’s an inference of irregularity. A polite way of saying someone panicked. Or acted intentionally.
Berulis suspects it’s worse. He thinks an account might have been created, used, and deleted as early as March 2025. Before anyone asked questions.
Should we be hearing from someone under oath about this? Yes. Is anyone testifying before November? Don Moynihan thinks not.
So we are left with a footnote. And a blank screen. And a government agency that lost the ability to prove its own employees weren’t stealing secrets.
We never really found out who logged in.
