DOGE and Data

What is DOGE, the illegitimate Department of Government Efficiency headed by Elon Musk, really up to?

It’s certainly not to make the government more efficient. Randomly firing thousands of employees is not the way to make any agency or department operate more efficiently.

Not even to save taxpayers money.

One of the strongest clues on the real purpose of DOGE is the expertise and actions of its employees. Most of the people working for DOGE are young computer software engineers, not the forensic accountants you would expect if their purpose was to look for fraud and waste. And these people have no security clearance, no vetting, and no experience with the agencies they are invading. What they appear to be after is access to data. Sensitive personal data of millions of Americans held in the computers of each organization or department that DOGE invades.

In his April 16 substack Thom Hartmann wrote about the whistleblower Daniel Berulis who had disclosed what DOGE did at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). DOGE employees breached the NLRB computer system to access very sensitive data. Hartmann writes:

What’s being looted here isn’t just random bureaucratic files. We’re talking about the private information of whistleblowers, union organizers, witnesses in federal cases, proprietary corporate data, and labor rights enforcement strategies. Including complaints and complainants against Elon Musk’s companies.

They did not do it openly like you would expect if what they were doing was legal. No, they covered their tracks, refusing to log their activity, turning off monitoring tools, and deleting records of their access. This is what criminal hackers do, not government employees on legitimate government business. 

Jake Braun, a former White House cyber security official said any security officer "... would look at network activity like this and assume it's a nation-state attack from China or Russia." 

Shortly after the DOGE employees breached the NLRB computer security staffers noticed large amounts of data leaving the system – data that should never leave the NLRB and that has nothing to do with efficiency or saving money.

When Berulis reported the breach of security to agents of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) their alert was squashed by higher-ups in the Trump Administration. And Berulis received a threatening note taped to his door and was put under drone surveillance.

What will the Trump administration do with access to such data? If nothing else, they can use the threat of access to intimidate anyone thinking of opposing their regime and to force others to comply with their wishes. Hartmann writes:

This isn’t just about controlling government agencies and the courts; it’s about creating a culture of fear so pervasive that no one dares to challenge power. Workers won’t organize. Regulators won’t enforce. Whistleblowers won’t come forward. Democracy withers not with a bang, but with a whimper of silence and complicity.

But DOGE is doing more with the data than just obtaining access.  It appears that they are giving access to this data to Russia. Minutes after the DOGE breach NLRB staff detected log-in attempts from a Russian IP address, using the new DOGE username and password.

Even Berulis can’t imagine the purpose of stealing this data. He said:

"I can't attest to what their end goal was or what they're doing with the data. 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."

Today about 50 House Democrats sent a letter to William Cowen, acting general counsel of the NLRB demanding answers about this issue. The letter says in part:

"If true, these revelations describe a reckless approach to the handling of sensitive personal information of workers, which could leave these workers exposed to retaliation for engaging in legally protected union activity."

"Given DOGE's desire to access sensitive information at other federal agencies with a focus on payment information, it is unclear why DOGE would be interested in NLRB data that has nothing to do with federal payments." 

NLRB acting press secretary Tim Bearese denied that DOGE had requested access to the agency's data and denied that access had been granted. Bearese also said that the agency conducted an investigation and "determined that no breach of agency systems occurred."

This is the White House response by spokesperson Anna Kelly: 

"President Trump signed an Executive Order to hire DOGE employees at agencies and coordinate data sharing. Their highly-qualified team has been extremely public and transparent in its efforts to eliminate waste, fraud, and abuse across the Executive Branch, including the NLRB."

Kelly is trying to make the point that accessing and sharing data between agencies will somehow eliminate waste and make the government run more efficiently. That seems highly doubtful. Plus some sensitive data needs to be protected and sharing it will not benefit anyone (unless they want it for blackmail). And giving Russian hackers free access to this  sensitive data does not benefit America by any stretch of the imagination. And how is covering your tracks and pretending that they weren't there "public and transparent"?

As Hartmann noted “the Rosenbergs went to the electric chair for far less.”

Sources

https://www.npr.org/2025/04/15/nx-s1-5355896/doge-nlrb-elon-musk-spacex-security

https://hartmannreport.com/p/the-department-of-government-efficiency-fbd

https://www.npr.org/2025/04/24/nx-s1-5375118/congress-doge-nlrb-whistleblower

https://www.npr.org/2025/04/15/nx-s1-5355895/doge-musk-nlrb-takeaways-security

Update

Here is an April 30 article from the NYT outlining the Trump plan to create a "surveillance state".

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/30/opinion/musk-doge-data-ai.html