Federal Investigators Say Certain DOGE Records Were Deleted | WIRED

Overview

Federal Investigators Say Certain DOGE Records Were Deleted

On April 14, 2025, a federal IT staffer filed a whistleblower complaint with Congress alleging that members of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) had accessed and possibly exfiltrated sensitive information from the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).

Details

Just days after filing the complaint, Dan Berulis, the whistleblower, found the brakes on his car had been cut after getting into a minor accident near his home. The complaint, which went public in an NPR story the day after it was filed, caused an outcry, with members of Congress calling for an investigation. The following month, in May 2025, Fed Scoop reported that the NLRB’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) opened an investigation. It remains ongoing.

In April 2026, though, the Government Accountability Office (GAO)—a federal agency within the legislative branch that performs audits and investigations for Congress— published its own report about DOGE’s access to the NLRB’s systems, titled “National Labor Relations Board Detailees Did Not Access IT Systems Between April 16 and July 25, 2025.” The report conspicuously only covers the time period immediately following Berulis’ complaint, and does not address any DOGE activity before that point.

But nested in the footnotes of the report is another revelation: In August 2025, shortly after DOGE members left the NLRB but before the GAO’s investigators “requested to observe the systems,” the agency “deleted the team member accounts for system access after the agreement to detail DOGE team staff had expired.” Basically, this means that the digital records of what data and systems DOGE members accessed and when had been eliminated, leaving the GAO no way to confirm what NLRB staff told their investigators.

“I think you could imagine another situation where the footnote is the central theme of the report,” says Don Moynihan, a professor of public policy at the University of Michigan. “The report raises more questions than it resolves, such as who deleted the data.”

The NLRB enforces laws concerning unions and collective bargaining, and investigates unfair labor practices. This gives it access to the identities of whistleblowers as well as their testimony; information about trade secrets and other proprietary data that might be important in issues related to negotiations between employers and employees; and a wide variety of investigative materials.

According to Berulis’ whistleblower complaint, “DOGE officials required the highest level of access and unrestricted access to internal systems. They were to be given what are referred to as ‘tenant owner’ level accounts, with essentially unrestricted permission to read, copy, and alter data”—a level of access beyond that of the agency’s chief information officer.

In the report, GAO officials note that they “interviewed NLRB staff regarding what level of access they provided for each system to the DOGE team,” but were unable to confirm whether what they were told was true because the DOGE accounts and associated information had already been deleted from the NLRB’s systems. It’s also not clear exactly who from DOGE had access: Justin Fox, Nate Cavanaugh, and Jordan Wick were all at one point at the NLRB, but no specific DOGE members are named in the report nor in Berulis’ original whistleblower complaint.

The NLRB did not respond to a request for comment; neither did Fox, Cavanaugh, or Wick.

Tesla and Space X, both companies owned by Elon Musk, who also led DOGE, have been the subject of NLRB investigations. Earlier this year, the NLRB dropped the case against Space X, saying that the agency didn’t have jurisdiction over the company.

In an April statement announcing an investigation into the case’s dismissal, Democratic senators Elizabeth Warren and Richard Blumenthal wrote: “Given Musk’s extraordinary financial support for President Trump in the 2024 election, his substantial influence in the Trump Administration and interest in the NLRB’s work as head of [DOGE] … we seek answers to determine if the decision to drop the case may have been based on political considerations rather than the facts at hand.”

Jessica Baxter, a spokesperson for the GAO, says that the agency “stands behind our findings and our approach to conducting this review, including our title, which accurately reflects our findings. Our work is always nonpartisan, independent, and fact-based and follows a rigorous quality assurance process.”

According to the General Records Schedule (GRS), a set of mandatory guidelines that outlines how long agencies need to retain records before they can be destroyed or transferred to the National Archives, records from “systems requiring special accountability for access,” like those that include personally identifiable information or other forms of sensitive data, are required to be kept for six years. The two systems the GAO says DOGE accessed, the Electronic Official Personnel Folders and the Federal Personnel and Payroll System, both contain the personal information of federal workers.

“It's deeply concerning that [the NLRB] would delete records that would show the level of DOGE data access at the agency and do so so quickly,” says Dan Mc Grath, senior oversight counsel at Democracy Forward, a nonprofit litigation organization.

Additionally, the GRS stipulates that any pending or anticipated FOIA requests touching DOGE access records would independently prohibit destruction of the underlying records until those requests were fully resolved.

Nx Gen, one of the systems that Berulis claimed DOGE accessed before April 16, 2025, also contains sensitive case management data including unfair labor practice allegations.

“I would argue it violates the Federal Records Act because it's not preserving their activities and makes it so that people can't FOIA their records from the NLRB to see what actions they were taking there,” says Mc Grath. WIRED previously reported that several DOGE members would use the encrypted messaging app Signal, with messages set to autodelete, which experts have warned could violate laws around federal record retention.

Baxter, the GAO spokesperson, says the dates covered in the report were chosen so as to overlap with the investigation being conducted by the NLRB’s inspector general, but did not address questions about whether the deletion of the DOGE members’ accounts constituted a violation of federal law.

Michael Duff, a professor at Saint Louis University School of Law who formerly worked at the NLRB, tells WIRED that he was “aware of no legitimate reason” for the NLRB to delete the DOGE members’ data. “It is irregular and it is almost certainly contrary to practice.”

Duff also noted that the deletion of data in the midst of an ongoing investigation by the OIG was cause for increased concern. “Once you become aware that certain information is likely to be of interest to the public and you prevent access to that information and that information indeed disappears, I think inferences of irregularity are heightened, and I'm being charitable in the way I'm expressing that,” he says.

This may not have been the first time data was deleted from the NLRB system, according to Berulis’ complaint. “On or about March 6, 2025, at least one account’s naming structure suggested that it might have been created and later deleted for DOGE to use in the NLRB’s cloud systems,” wrote Berulis.

“In a functioning Congress that was performing its oversight function, this would be something that would result in a committee hearing and hard questions that weren’t covered in the GAO report,” says Moynihan. “Someone from the agency would need to go and testify under oath about what happened. My expectation is we're not gonna see anything like that between now and November.”

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Key Takeaways

Federal Investigators Say Certain DOGE Records Were Deleted
On April 14, 2025, a federal IT staffer filed a whistleblower complaint with Congress alleging that members of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) had accessed and possibly exfiltrated sensitive information from the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB)
Just days after filing the complaint, Dan Berulis, the whistleblower, found the brakes on his car had been cut after getting into a minor accident near his home
In April 2026, though, the Government Accountability Office (GAO)—a federal agency within the legislative branch that performs audits and investigations for Congress— published its own report about DOGE’s access to the NLRB’s systems, titled “National Labor Relations Board Detailees Did Not Access IT Systems Between April 16 and July 25, 2025
But nested in the footnotes of the report is another revelation: In August 2025, shortly after DOGE members left the NLRB but before the GAO’s investigators “requested to observe the systems,” the agency “deleted the team member accounts for system access after the agreement to detail DOGE team staff had expired