In April 2025, a federal IT staffer filed a whistleblower report alleging that members of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency had caused a significant cybersecurity breach at the National Labor Relations Board. Within days, Musk posted about him publicly. The day after that, the whistleblower's brake line was cut. The story resurfaced this month after circulating widely across social media, prompting a fresh wave of public attention more than a year after the original incident.

Dan Berulis, an IT staffer at the NLRB, filed his report on April 14, 2025, alleging that DOGE officials had demanded unrestricted access to internal systems with “essentially unrestricted permission to read, copy, and alter data.” He added that within minutes of DOGE personnel creating user accounts, login attempts came from an IP address in Primorskiy Krai, Russia, using the correct usernames and passwords. He noted that many of these attempts came within 15 minutes of engineers opening their accounts.

The attempts failed only because of the NLRB's no-out-of-country login policy. Berulis also told NPR that raising concerns internally resulted in someone physically taping a threatening note to his door that included overhead photos of him walking his dog. NPR, which broke the story, had also corroborated it with internal documents.

On April 19, Musk reposted a claim that Berulis had fabricated his report, captioning it: “Filing a deliberately false whistleblower claim is a serious crime.” The next day, Berulis got into his car and discovered his brakes had failed. He ran into a curb after calling his legal team. A police officer who arrived on the scene noted a cut wire under the hood and photographed it.

Police collected fingerprints, and Berulis provided video of a drone he had observed flying above his house. Police later closed the investigation after being unable to identify a suspect. The identity of whoever cut the brake line has never been determined, and there is no evidence connecting Musk to the incident.

In April 2026, Berulis filed a defamation lawsuit against Musk, alleging he showed “reckless disregard” for whether the accusations against Berulis were accurate. That lawsuit is ongoing.

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