The NLRB, a New Deal-era agency that is tasked with protecting workers’ rights to organize and join unions, has for years been a target of America’s corporate titans – including Musk – some of whom are now seeking to have the agency’s powers declared unconstitutional.
Also Read: US Defense Secretary plans to cut $5 billion in contracts after DOGE reviewIn an affidavit, Berulis said he had evidence that DOGE staffers were given extraordinarily sweeping access to the NLRB’s systems, which house sensitive case files. He said that beginning in early March, logging protocols created to audit users appeared to have been tampered with, and that he had detected the removal of about 10 gigabytes worth of data from NLRB’s network sometime thereafter.
Berulis told Reuters in an interview Tuesday that the data in question includes proprietary business information from competitors, union organization and unfair labor practice respondents and their claims, including private affidavits. “That kind of spike is extremely unusual because data almost never directly leaves NLRB’s databases,” Berulis said in his affidavit.
A spokesperson for Musk’s team – officially known as U.S. DOGE Service – didn’t immediately return a message seeking comment. A message left with the NLRB also wasn’t immediately returned, although NPR, which first reported the story, opens new tab, quoted an NLRB spokesperson as disputing Berulis’ claims and saying there had been no breach. Cotton and Warner didn’t immediately return messages seeking comment.
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Berulis alleged in the affidavit that there were attempted logins to NLRB systems from an IP address in Russia in the days after DOGE accessed the systems. He told Reuters Tuesday that the attempted logins apparently included correct username and password combinations but were rejected by location-related conditional access policies.
