MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Since President Trump took office again in January, members of the ad hoc cost-cutting group led by Elon Musk, the Department of Government Efficiency - or DOGE - have aggressively sought to get their hands on government data and computer systems. A whistleblower has told Congress and NPR about what DOGE did when it arrived at the National Labor Relations Board. We're joined now by NPR's Jenna McLaughlin, who covers cybersecurity. Good morning, Jenna.
JENNA MCLAUGHLIN, BYLINE: Good morning, Michel.
MARTIN: So what sort of things did the whistleblower see that made him want to come forward?
MCLAUGHLIN: A lot. So the whistleblower's name is Daniel Berulis, and he's one of the people who manages the NLRB's cloud. That's the virtual servers that host almost all the agency's data. So when DOGE arrived, he says they demanded the highest level of access, the so-called god-tier accounts, and then weird stuff started happening. He saw a big spike in data leaving the agency, something that almost never happens. Meanwhile, security and monitoring tools were turned off, a bunch of records were deleted. He even started to notice login attempts from a Russian IP address that had the right username and password. Listen to how he describes it.
DANIEL BERULIS: Why was that done? And that's a purposeful effort - that doesn't just happen. Logs don't just disappear. Tools don't just turn themselves off randomly.
MCLAUGHLIN: It's difficult to prove exactly what happened....
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