Wired: “A government report claims DOGE didn’t access sensitive systems. It also says the agency deleted records that would show if they had. On April 14, 2025, a federal IT staffer filed a whistleblower complaint with Congress alleging that members of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) had accessed and possibly exfiltrated sensitive information from the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). Just days after filing the complaint, Dan Berulis, the whistleblower, found the brakes on his car had been cut after getting into a minor accident near his home. The complaint, which went public in an NPR story the day after it was filed, caused an outcry, with members of Congress calling for an investigation. The following month, in May 2025, FedScoop reported that the NLRB’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) opened an investigation. It remains ongoing. In April 2026, though, the Government Accountability Office (GAO)—a federal agency within the legislative branch that performs audits and investigations for Congress— published its own report about DOGE’s access to the NLRB’s systems, titled “National Labor Relations Board Detailees Did Not Access IT Systems Between April 16 and July 25, 2025.” The report conspicuously only covers the time period immediately following Berulis’ complaint, and does not address any DOGE activity before that point.

But nested in the footnotes of the report is another revelation: In August 2025, shortly after DOGE members left the NLRB but before the GAO’s investigators “requested to observe the systems,” the agency “deleted the team member accounts for system access after the agreement to detail DOGE team staff had expired.” Basically, this means that the digital records of what data and systems DOGE members accessed and when had been eliminated, leaving the GAO no way to confirm what NLRB staff told their investigators…”