Hands off the NLRB.

Labor Lawlessness

It’s no shock that dedicated union buster Elon Musk sicced his minions on the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) — but the way those churlish youths are handling the agency’s data seems extremely suspicious.

As NPR reports, staffers with the billionaire’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) could have stolen corporate secrets, ongoing legal disputes, and private union information when they rifled through the labor watchdog’s internal servers earlier this year.

According to Daniel Berulis, the NLRB whistleblower who made these damning allegations to Congress and in subsequent interviews with NPR, DOGE engineers extracted troves of data from the agency’s systems.

In his Congressional disclosure, Berulis also claimed that attacks from a Russian IP address occurred within minutes of DOGE gaining access to the NLRB’s servers.

Internal documentation of the alleged breach attempt and the strange spike in data extraction — an alarming and unusual occurrence at the independent agency, per dozens of experts that NPR spoke to — corroborates the whistleblower’s story. But the agency’s press secretary, Tim Bearese, denies that any such breach occurred and claimed that DOGE neither asked for nor was granted access to NLRB systems in the first place.

“I can’t attest to what their end goal was or what they’re doing with the data,” Berulis told NPR. “But I can tell you that the bits of the puzzle that I can quantify are scary.”

Hostile Workplace

Along with seeming to steal a bunch of data and the very suspicious timing of the breach attempt, the whistleblower was, he claimed in his initial Congressional disclosure, personally targeted as well.

After Berulis brought the concerning data movement up internally, someone taped a “threatening note” to his office door that included personal information and birds-eye-view photos of him, seemingly shot with a drone, walking his dog.

Though there’s ample brazenly unethical and allegedly illegal behavior on display in this second Trump administration, these whistleblower claims are particularly troubling because Musk has had it out for the NLRB — which has also, notably, accused SpaceX of illegal anti-labor practices — since it forced him in 2021 to delete an old anti-union tweet.

Last year, SpaceX sued the labor board and claimed it was unconstitutional; now, the unelected billionaire seems to have the unchecked power to do what he wants with it.

More on Musk’s meddling: Nobel-Winning Scientist Says His Researchers Are Fleeing the Country Because of Trump’s Cruelty