On April 14, 2025, Dan Berulis, an IT staffer at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), filed a Congressional whistleblower complaint with an extraordinary and urgent claim: The so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) had seemingly compromised the agency’s data and appeared to be exfiltrating it out of the NLRB entirely. Additionally, Berulis claimed that mere minutes after DOGE members had accessed the agency’s data, there appeared to be login attempts from an IP address in Russia.
At the time, DOGE teams, orchestrated by billionaire Elon Musk, were sweeping across government, firing federal workers, and accessing sensitive data and technical systems with no oversight and little transparency.
The following day, Berulis went public in an NPR article with his name and claims. In it, he claimed that in the lead up to his Congressional disclosure, a threatening note had been taped to his door, including photos of him walking his dog that appeared to have been taken by a drone. Berulis was already scared that speaking out had made him a target.
In a new defamation lawsuit, filed by Berulis in a DC court on April 17 and made public this week, Berulis alleges that Musk himself made him a target of further violence by falsely stating that Berulis’ whistleblower claim against DOGE was fake. The complaint was initially filed under seal because Berulis maintains a security clearance that requires pre-publication review of anything related to his work with the government.
Five days after the NPR story went live, on Easter Sunday, April 20, 2025, Berulis got in his car to drive to Maryland to make a last-minute visit to his uncle, opting to take local roads instead of the major highway nearby. Within about five minutes of leaving his house, Berulis realized something was wrong. As he approached a stop sign at an intersection, his car wouldn’t slow down. He ran off the road and into the sign. When he examined his car, he found something that terrified him: His brake lines had been cut.
Unbeknownst to Berulis at the time, the night before, on April 19, at 8:06 pm, Musk had reshared an X post from right-wing influencer Mario Nawfal, claiming that DOGE had been “cleared” and that people were asking the the Department of Justice to investigate Berulis. Musk shared Nawfal’s post, writing, “Filing a deliberately false whistleblower claim is a serious crime.” The story had originally been circulated by @amuse, an account that has regularly shared misleading claims and misinformation and is followed by influential people like Musk and Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. The @amuse post included Berulis’ name and photograph.
According to a police report viewed by WIRED, when a police officer from Prince William County arrived at the scene, Berulis’ lawyer from Whistleblower Aid, Andrew Bakaj, who had helped Berulis file his Congressional complaint about DOGE, was also on the scene.
Berulis, who found out about Musk’s tweet after the accident, thought back to the threatening note that had been posted on his door earlier that month.
According to the suit, Musk’s “readers drew the implication” that Berulis had committed a serious crime, “as reflected in replies demanding prosecution, jail, harm, or arrest,” and this put him at “increased risk of physical harm.” In the replies to the post, which remains online, several users called for Berulis to be prosecuted. One user wrote, “Snitches get stitches”.
“The correlation was obvious to me, with the timing,” he says. Berulis also began to worry about how exactly whoever had been threatening him knew where he lived.
“I had just moved into that address three months prior. The only people that had that address were my utilities and the [Office of Personnel Management], and the HR systems within my agency,” he says. “I hadn’t even updated my bank, my cell phone, my car registration, my license, all of it was not on that address yet.”
The Office of Personnel Management (OPM), functions as a sort of HR for the whole government, and was one of the first places where DOGE operatives appeared after President Donald Trump was sworn into office in January 2025.
Berulis stayed in a hotel that night, frightened. In the following weeks, he canceled his lease and moved out.
The brake lines incident probably happened “while the car was parked in the driveway of my house. The note arrived at the house,” he says. “I didn’t feel safe there at all. I never stayed at that address again.”
Since then, Berulis has laid low. He filed a police report, included in the suit and viewed by WIRED, and had the car seen by a mechanic who, according to the report, found “that the driver-side front impact/airbag sensor had also been removed but noted that the remaining wires had been spliced together, completing the circuit in a manner that prevented the vehicle from detecting or logging the missing component, while also preventing the vehicle from activating its safety protocols, alerting the driver, or engaging limp mode.” The police report also indicates that fingerprints had been found on Berulis’ car. According to the police report, the case is now “inactive,” “due to the lack of any specific suspect information,” though the police’s intelligence unit was notified.
In the days following the accident, Berulis even reported Musk’s post to X’s trust and safety team, but was told that it didn’t violate the platform’s policies. Musk, X, and Mario Nawfal, the influencer whose post citing @amuse’s story Musk reshared, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Alexander Muse, who runs @amuse, told WIRED that “Tim Bearese, an NRLB lawyer, denied that the agency granted DOGE access to its systems and stated that DOGE had not requested access. NLRB IG Ruth Blevins and DOL IG Luiz Santos found Berulis’ claims baseless.” In response to NPR’s initial reporting in 2025, Bearese—whom NPR identified as NLRB’s acting press secretary, but whose LinkedIn lists him as a staff attorney—said that the agency had determined that “no breach of agency systems occurred.”
In an X post, written after WIRED reached out for comment, Muse wrote that “the NLRB OIG’s April 2026 semiannual report says it closed investigation OIG-I-588 after finding the employee seeking whistleblower protection lacked a reasonable belief that he was disclosing a violation of law, rule, or regulation.”
Berulis initially filed his disclosures with the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the US Office of the Special Counsel. Following Berulis’ disclosure, in a letter to Santos and Blevins, then-ranking Democratic member Gerry Connolly of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee requested that the NLRB’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) investigate the claims. At the time, Bearese confirmed to FedScoop that the OIG had opened an investigation. In response to the assertion in Muse’s post that the OIG had closed the investigation, Kel McClanahan, a public interest lawyer who is serving as Berulis’ spokesperson, says, “Mr. Berulis talked to the OIG at their request between April-July 2025, after he went to Congress. This report is about activities between October 2025-March 2026. I can’t comment on the whistleblower that Amuse is talking about, but I suggest they might want to consult a calendar.”
McClanahan confirmed that Berulis left the NLRB on April 29, 2025. An April report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO), covering the time period between April 16 and July 25, 2025—after Berulis filed his disclosure—notes that “The Board’s Inspector General is investigating allegations that one or more DOGE team members arrived in March 2025, unlawfully accessed the Board’s case management systems, and allowed potential foreign actors to exfiltrate or steal data.”
A spokesperson for the NLRB declined to comment, but confirmed that Berulis’ case was ongoing.
“Mr. Berulis wants what every whistleblower wants: not to be made to suffer for doing the right thing,” says McClanahan. “His life was threatened, his name was smeared, and millions of people he’d never meet were publicly calling for his imprisonment or worse. He just wants to be made whole and live in peace.”
Berulis says that he knows filing the suit could put him back in Musk’s crosshairs. “It’s kicking the hornet’s nest,” he says. “It’s honestly more nerve wracking than when I filed the whistleblower complaint.”
Though the suit might not go far, Berulis says it feels worth it to him, particularly if the case is able to shed light on Musk’s role with DOGE and how the organization was run, and how he was discussing or thinking about Berulis’ disclosure at the time. This, Berulis says, might help other litigants in the many cases against DOGE.
If he were to win, Berulis says, he wants the proceeds to go towards defending other whistleblowers.
“I’m not expecting to win this. The asymmetry here is real,” he says. “But I am trying to get something positive out of it. I’m hoping I can help someone else with this.”
The post He Blew the Whistle on DOGE. Then His Brakes Were Cut appeared first on Wired.
