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A federal IT staffer filed a complaint about DOGE, then went public. Shortly after Elon Musk boosted a post calling his claims false, his brake lines were cut. Now he’s suing for defamation.

On April 14, 2025, Dan Berulis, an IT staffer at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), filed a Congressional whistleblower complaint with an extraordinary and urgent claim: DOGE had seemingly compromised the agency’s data and appeared to be exfiltrating it out of the NLRB entirely.

The following day, Berulis went public in an NPR article with his name and claims. In it, he claimed that in the lead up to his Congressional disclosure, a threatening note had been taped to his door, including photos of him walking his dog that appeared to have been taken by a drone.

Five days after the NPR story went live, on Easter Sunday, April 20, 2025, Berulis got in his car to drive to Maryland to make a last-minute visit to his uncle, opting to take local roads instead of the major highway nearby.

Within about five minutes of leaving his house, Berulis realized something was wrong. As he approached a stop sign at an intersection, his car wouldn’t slow down. He ran off the road and into the sign. When he examined his car, he found something that terrified him: His brake lines had been cut.

Unbeknownst to Berulis at the time, the night before, on April 19, at 8:06 pm, Musk had reshared an X post from right-wing influencer Mario Nawfal, claiming that DOGE had been “cleared” and that people were asking the DOJ to investigate Berulis.

Musk shared Nawfal’s post, writing, “Filing a deliberately false whistleblower claim is a serious crime.” The story had originally been circulated by an account that has regularly shared misleading claims and misinformation.