DOGE Seems to Be Stealing Sensitive Labor Data, Whistlebower Says

Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency is very likely stealing sensitive labor data from the National Labor Relations Board, according to a whistleblower from inside the agency.

NPR reports that a whistleblower reached out to Congress and other federal watchdogs, alarmed about what they saw happen when DOGE employees gained access to the NLRB’s internal systems. Ostensibly, the DOGE staffers said they were reviewing the agency’s data to comply with the Trump administration’s new policies, as well as to cut costs and increase efficiency.

But, according to the whistleblower report, the NLRB’s technical staff were shocked to see a sharp increase of data leaving the agency and DOGE employees covering their tracks. The NLRB holds sensitive information about unions, legal cases about workplace complaints, and corporate secrets, data which, according to four labor law experts who spoke to NPR, is highly sensitive and should rarely, if ever, leave the agency.

“I can’t attest to what their end goal was or what they’re doing with the data,” the whistleblower, Daniel Berulis, told NPR. “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.”

A former White House cybersecurity official, Jake Braun, told NPR that a foreign actor could be involved in the increase in data leaving the agency.

“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,” Braun told NPR.

According to Berulis, right after DOGE gained access to the NLRB, a Russia-based I.P. address tried to log in. While that attempt was blocked, it happened to be using one of the new DOGE accounts and had the correct name and password.

Berulis also said DOGE employees requested accounts that would allow them to read, copy, and alter NLRB data, the highest level of access in the agency. When one IT staffer suggested a streamlined way to set up the accounts that would track DOGE’s actions, all I.T. employees were told to stay out of DOGE’s way.

“That was a huge red flag,” Berulis said. “That’s something that you just don’t do. It violates every core concept of security and best practice.”

The whistleblower report pointed out that controls to prevent insecure or unauthorized mobile devices, such as phones and tablets, from logging into the NLRB system were disabled. Some of the agency’s system was left exposed to the public internet, leaving it vulnerable to attacks. On top of that, internal alerts and monitors had been turned off, with login authentication disabled.

All of this raises disturbing questions about what DOGE did not only with the NLRB’s data but with the data it has collected from across the federal government, which includes Americans’ sensitive personal information. But with Musk exercising unchallenged authority in the government with Trump’s blessing, what can be done?

Secretary of State Marco Rubio has broadly claimed that students who participated in protests opposing the genocide of Palestinians aided in the spread of antisemitism on college campuses, as a justification for the Trump administration revoking their visa status. 

But Mohsen Mahdawi, a Columbia University student who was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement Monday at his citizenship interview in Vermont, strongly condemned antisemitism during an interview on CBS News’s 60 Minutes in December 2023.

During the interview, Mahdawi was asked about his experience hearing someone say, “Death to Jews” at a pro-Palestine walk-out  at Columbia a month after the massacre on October 7, which launched Israel’s catastrophic military campaign in Gaza that has killed more than 50,000 people. 

“I was shocked, and I walked directly to the person, and I told him, ‘You don’t represent us because this is not something that we agree with,’” Mahdawi recounted. 

“And I took the megaphone and I gave a speech and I said, ‘We here, are conscious, educated students and we know how to separate right from wrong. What this guy has said is clearly antisemitic against Jews.… To be antisemitic is unjust, is unjust. And the fight for the freedom of Palestine and the fight against antisemitism go hand in hand because injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,’” he said. 

Mahdawi, a Palestinian from the West Bank who said he’d seen his best friend killed by Israeli soldiers, was also president of the Columbia Buddhist Club and founder of the Palestinian Student Union. Mahdawi is a green card holder, like Mahmoud Khalil, another Columbia graduate student who was arrested by ICE last month. On Friday, a Louisiana immigration judge ruled that Khalil could be deported because he had endangered U.S. foreign policy. 

Last week, in an op-ed for Fox News, Rubio invoked supposed antisemitism as a reason to crack down on student protesters. 

“In the aftermath of the October 7, 2023 terrorist attacks against Israel, some of these foreign student visitors engaged in antisemitic activities and intimidation of Americans, many who happened to be of the Jewish faith,” Rubio wrote. “These foreigners shut down college campuses for American citizens, harassed Jewish students, blocked highways, and stormed buildings.”

Despite Rubio’s claim that visa revocations targeted students engaged in “antisemitic activities,” the State Department has already admitted that some of its targets don’t fit the bill. 

Before Tufts University student Rumeysa Ozturk was grabbed off the street by ICE agents, the State Department determined that the Trump administration had no evidence linking her to antisemitic activity.

Kristi Noem is obsessed with being the face of Homeland Security, and it’s starting to annoy officials across White House agencies.

The Homeland Security secretary is known for her live tweeting of deportation raids and publicity stunts. She’s filmed videos while accompanying ICE on deportation raids in Arizona and on a helicopter ride with the Coast Guard. She often sports an ICE baseball cap, cowboy boots, a bullet-proof vest and always with a full blowout, fake eyelashes, and a $50,000 Rolex watch on her wrist—a desperate attempt to glamorize the White House’s mass deportation plan.

On her first day in office, Noem tweeted about a New York ICE raid (with a photo of herself of course) before the raid was even over, which hindered the element of surprise and pissed off ICE officials, The Wall Street Journal reported Monday.

As the face of national security, Noem seemingly feels the need to be physically part of her department’s (often illegal) deportation efforts, or at least be the spokesperson for them. Following the unlawful deportation of more than 200 Venezuelan immigrants to El Salvador, many of whom had no criminal record, Noem herself flew to the megaprison where they were being held to film a propaganda video.

“I also want everybody to know, if you come to our country illegally, this is one of the consequences you can face,” Noem said from the prison in a video posted on X. “Know that this facility is one of the tools in our tool kit that we will use if you commit crimes against the American people.”

Her frequent travel means she is pretty much never at her office in Washington, D.C., “which has irritated many at DHS,” sources told the Journal. Her internal credibility is further weakened by the appointment of other officials like Tom Homan and Stephen Miller, who control much of the deportation logistics. Noem reportedly can’t handle losing the spotlight in the office (where you’ll find framed photos of her on ICE ride-alongs).

“Noem has grown so distrustful of agency staff that she has started threatening and even administering polygraph tests to people suspected of leaking, including Trump appointees, according to officials familiar with the matter,” the Journal wrote.

Though DHS has deported more than 23,000 people since January under Noem’s leadership, the president is frustrated she’s nowhere near his goal of deporting one million people per year. Add him to the list of people pissed at Kristi Noem.

At a rally in Nampa, Idaho, on Monday, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had a message for her colleague, Representative Marjorie Taylor-Greene.

“How can anyone possibly make an objective vote on health care, energy, or war when their own money is tied up in pharmaceutical, oil and gas, or defense company stocks? You can’t. And we saw it just happen with Trump’s corrupt and disastrous and rushed tariff scheme, Ocasio-Cortez told the crowd at the Fighting Oligarchy rally with Senator Bernie Sanders.

“We saw Marjorie Taylor Greene buy that dip,” Ocasio-Cortez added to boos from the audience. “I got one question for her: How much did you make? How much did you make off of people’s despair? How much did you make off that panic? How much did you make off of that suffering?”

According to a public disclosure Monday, Greene bought between $21,000 and $315,000 in stocks last Tuesday and Wednesday in 17 companies including Apple, Tesla, Nvidia, and Palantir, just hours before President Trump announced he was partially pausing some of his tariffs and deepening a possible ethics violation. Trump later bragged about how much money his friends made off of the pause, blatantly admitting to market manipulation.

“I hope we see now that it was all about manipulating the markets so that he could quietly enrich his friends who bought the dip before reversing it all in the morning,” Ocasio-Cortez said.

Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders have been barnstorming the country, holding rallies against oligarchy and the Trump administration. They have drawn large crowds angry at Trump and the GOP, even in areas that strongly support Republicans, by calling out the influence of billionaires in American politics at the expense of everyone else. If their attacks keep landing, their rallies will only grow and build momentum for a long-overdue political revolution.

Attorney General Pam Bondi is ignoring the obvious illegality of President Donald Trump’s outrageous request to exile U.S. citizens to foreign prisons.

During an interview Monday night, Fox News host Jesse Watters asked the attorney general whether Trump’s pitch to outsource the imprisonment of U.S. citizens was even legal.

“Now, the president was musing about sending some of the most horrible people in this country down to that megaprison, you know, people that push ladies into subways and hit old ladies with baseball bats to the head. Is that legal to do, is that something you’re allowed to do?” Watters asked.

“Well, Jesse, these are Americans who he is saying who have committed the most heinous crimes in our country, and crime is going to decrease dramatically because he has given us the directive to make America safe again,” Bondi replied. “These people need to be locked up as long as they can, as long as the law allows, we’re not gonna let ’em go anywhere. And if we have to build more prisons in our country, we will do it!”

Bondi’s answer is lacking, well, an actual answer—probably because deporting U.S. citizens is not legal. Trump’s plan to exile Americans who are incarcerated to foreign countries not only violates multiple federal codes on the keeping of U.S. prisoners, it would also potentially violate the Fifth, Eighth, and Fourteenth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution.

Bondi’s canned answer came just hours after Trump said during a press conference with Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele that he had specifically asked her to look into the legality of sending U.S. citizens to El Salvador to be imprisoned. Trump made no mention of building additional prisons in the U.S., but said that the U.S. would be willing to financially support the construction of more prisons abroad.

Clearly, Bondi is waging a political battle as much as a legal one, despite her promises that she would not act merely as an operative for Trump. Bondi must know that committing a “most heinous” crime does not actually disqualify citizens from their legal rights—but when faced with Trump’s despotic plot, the attorney general declined to offer an answer in accordance with U.S. law.