The Brooklyn Rail

What is DOGE going to do with all the sensitive data they are exfiltrating (stealing) from the databases of the government (and some non-government) agencies they have infiltrated over the past two months, ostensibly to “audit” them, to “increase efficiency”? Is this hoovering up of data in fact the real purpose of DOGE? And if so, to what end? A recent development in the DOGE saga may eventually provide some answers.

On the morning of April 15, Jenna McLaughlin, the cybersecurity correspondent for National Public Radio, reported that a whistleblower named Dan Berulis had filed an official whistleblower disclosure with Congress and other federal overseers stating that sensitive data from the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) systems had been breached and exfiltrated by DOGE.¹

In the first week of March, a DOGE team arrived at NLRB headquarters and began to access the agency’s internal systems. This was all done behind closed doors and without consulting NLRB staffers. Soon after this, technical staff at the agency noticed a spike in data leaving the agency. This data included sensitive information on unions, people wanting to form unions, ongoing legal cases (including several against Elon Musk’s businesses), and corporate secrets. None of this data had anything to do with making the government more efficient.

Dan Berulis and a number of other technical staffers at the NLRB were alarmed by this breach and began to record the thefts. The DOGE minions stayed at the NLRB for a week, and when they left, they had turned off monitoring tools and manually deleted all records of their access—just what criminal or state-sponsored hackers would do after a heist. They had removed much of the security system for the accounts they had infiltrated and exfiltrated, and they left all the digital doors open on their way out. Minutes after they left, someone with an IP address in Russia tried to access these newly made DOGE accounts, with the correct usernames and passwords for those accounts.

At this same time, someone took a “meat space” action against Dan Berulis, leaving a threatening note taped to his door that contained personal information about him (Social Security number and date of birth, parents, addresses, etc.) and recent aerial images of Berulis walking his dog near where he lived. The menacing note explicitly referenced Berulis’s decision to report the breach and call for an independent investigation.

The day after the NPR story broke, DOGE representatives showed up at the NLRB office and sent an email to the NLRB chairman saying two DOGE representatives would be detailed to the NLRB “part-time for several months.” Why are they coming into the building in advance of an investigation of their previous actions?

Musk has several cases before the NLRB and the Department of Labor involving his companies SpaceX, Tesla, and X, and SpaceX is part of a lawsuit seeking to have the courts declare the NLRB’s structure unconstitutional.

In an interview with NPR, Berulis said “I can’t attest to what their end goal was or what they’re doing with the data, 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.”²

Berulis’s whistleblower disclosure includes a lot of highly technical details about the DOGE engineers’ actions and methods. A former White House cyber official told NPR, “If he didn’t know the backstory, any [chief information security officer] worth his salt would look at network activity like this and assume it’s a nation-state attack from China or Russia.”

The NLRB story dovetails with testimony in more than a dozen court cases detailing how DOGE gained access to private financial and personal information on hundreds of millions of Americans from other agencies.

The question now is: What is DOGE actually doing? What is DOGE for? It obviously has nothing to do with “waste, fraud, and abuse” and “improving government efficiency.” Musk originally said DOGE was going to cut “at least” $2 trillion from the federal budget. On January 30, he cut that pledge in half, saying they would definitely cut $1 trillion from the bloated US budget. On April 10, he downsized that to $150 billion, but only $63 billion of that was even remotely credible, and now even that low figure has been shown to include a host of outright errors and exaggerations. DOGE’s actions have had and will have no impact on government spending. So what is their real purpose?

Many of the cuts have been ideologically driven (climate change initiatives, scientific research, foreign aid, DEI programs), but this is clearly primarily a data-gathering operation. But to what end or ends?

In the case of the NLRB breach, some of this information could have disastrous effects on individual workers, union-organizing campaigns, and unions themselves, effects Trump has long pursued. And there are the obvious benefits to Elon Musk in relation to his own companies and his competitors to consider. But is there a larger plan?

Jenna McLaughlin’s NPR reporting made some educated guesses:

Musk's company xAI could also benefit from sucking up all the data DOGE has collected to train its algorithms. Cybersecurity experts like Bruce Schneier, a well-known cryptographer and adjunct lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School, have pointed to this concern at length in interviews and written pieces.

Schneier has also raised the alarm about the national security issues with DOGE:

There are many actors, foreign and domestic, government and criminal, that want access to, and control of, both our data and computing infrastructure. So, as a nation, we spent a lot of time and effort and money on cybersecurity. And what DOGE is doing is bypassing that security. They are accessing data through insecure means. They're copying data onto unprotected servers. They’re using it to train AIs. In some cases, they're modifying government systems in ways that have not been tested. And all of this provides opportunities to our enemies.³

And to our “enemies within.” Much of the data DOGE has collected could very easily be weaponized against Trump’s political opponents and citizen activists.

In light of the wholesale stripping of public money for personal gain that DOGE may be pursuing, Trump’s current offer to give individual Americans checks from the DOGE’s purported savings is a rich irony.

It should also be noted in this context that Elon Musk has been trying to kill NPR and PBS for some time, and the Trump administration is now asking Congress to claw back federal funding from NPR and PBS.⁴ NPR appears to be resisting its Trump/Musk planned demise.