NPR's cybersecurity correspondent Jenna McLaughlin recently broke a story about a whistleblower inside the federal government who says DOGE representatives appear to have taken sensitive data, then covered their tracks. Daniel Berulis works for the National Labor Relations Board and he has shared evidence that DOGE engineers disabled security protocols, exported reams of sensitive data and used a "hacker's toolkit" to hide their activities. And he thinks his agency is not alone. Today on The Sunday Story, what this possible breach could mean for the private data of millions of Americans.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
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I'm Ayesha Roscoe, and this is the Sunday Story from Up First. And today, we've got a big one. Recently, NPR reporter Jenna McLaughlin broke open a huge story about a whistleblower from inside the federal government. His name is Daniel Barulis, and for him, it all started on a Friday at the end of February.
I remember the moment vividly. I was at home, and I got a call from my boss saying, hey, My boss wants us to come in next week. It's possible Doge will show up.
On Monday, he sees a black SUV with a police escort pull into the parking garage at their office in D.C. Daniel didn't speak to anyone in the SUV, but he assumes it was members of the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOJ. He'd been hearing about DOJ showing up with police escorts around town, and based on that call with his boss, he was expecting them to arrive that day.
They didn't want to interface with us, the admins. They wanted system access to the cloud. That's what they were there for.
and access to the cloud they got. This is Berulis' whole job, to guard the sensitive data in the cloud of his agency. He works at the National Labor Relations Board, or NLRB, which is a small, independent federal agency that enforces the law to protect people from unfair labor practices, like when a corporation wants to illegally punish workers for organizing a union.
After the Doge team arrived, Barula saw one red flag after another, indicating that sensitive data at the NLRB was at risk. It scared him enough to come forward as a whistleblower. He filed a disclosure with Congress and he approached Jenna at NPR. Baruch's story gives us a rare look at what Doge was doing inside this agency and perhaps inside many others.
And also what that means for the sensitive data of millions of Americans. Jenna McLaughlin has covered cybersecurity for over a decade. Stephen Fowler is also with us. He's been focusing on the big picture of the federal government's restructuring under President Trump. Jenna and Stephen, thanks so much for being here.
Thank you.
Thanks for having us. So tell me a bit about this particular whistleblower at the NLRB. Like, who is he?
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