He Filed DOGE Whistleblowing—Then His Brakes Were Cut

Dan Berulis, an NLRB IT staffer, says his whistleblower complaint about the DOGE program led to escalating threats—culminating in an April 20, 2025 crash in which his brake lines were allegedly cut. In a defamation suit filed in Washington, D.C. on April 17, B

On April 20, 2025—Easter Sunday—Dan Berulis got into his car to drive to Maryland for a last-minute visit with his uncle. He took local roads instead of the major highway nearby. Within about five minutes of leaving home, he reached an intersection and tried to slow down.

The brakes wouldn’t come. Berulis ran off the road and into a stop sign.

When he later examined the car, the detail that kept landing back in his mind was the one that made the crash feel like an attack rather than an accident: his brake lines had been cut.

The crash wasn’t the first time Berulis says he felt singled out after speaking about the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). On April 14, 2025, he filed a Congressional whistleblower complaint as an IT staffer at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). In that complaint. Berulis claimed DOGE had “seemingly compromised” the agency’s data and appeared to be exfiltrating it out of the NLRB entirely. He also alleged that mere minutes after DOGE members accessed the agency’s data. there were login attempts from an IP address in Russia.

At the time, DOGE teams—orchestrated by billionaire Elon Musk—were sweeping across government, firing federal workers, and accessing sensitive data and technical systems with “no oversight and little transparency,” according to Berulis’ account.

The next day. Berulis went public in an NPR article using his name and describing what he claimed were direct threats. He said that in the lead-up to his Congressional disclosure, a threatening note had been taped to his door. The note allegedly included photos of him walking his dog—images that appeared to have been taken by a drone. Berulis told NPR he was already scared that speaking out had made him a target.

Five days after the NPR story went live, on Easter Sunday, April 20, 2025, the brake failure came fast—after days of fear that someone had learned where he lived.

Two weeks earlier, the legal fight around his disclosure had already begun to shift from whistleblowing to personal danger.

On April 17, Berulis filed a defamation lawsuit in a DC court. The filing—which he says was initially under seal because he maintains a security clearance requiring pre-publication review of anything related to his government work—was made public this week.

In the suit, Berulis alleges that Musk made him a target of further violence by falsely stating that Berulis’ whistleblower claim against DOGE was fake.

What Berulis points to is timing. The night before the crash, on April 19 at 8:06 pm, Musk reshared an X post from right-wing influencer Mario Nawfal. Nawfal’s post claimed DOGE had been “cleared” and said people were asking the Department of Justice to investigate Berulis. Musk shared the post with the line: “Filing a deliberately false whistleblower claim is a serious crime.”.

The story that Nawfal boosted had originated from @amuse. an account that has regularly shared misleading claims and misinformation and is followed by influential people including Musk and Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. The @amuse post included Berulis’ name and photograph.

Berulis’ lawsuit argues that Musk’s “readers drew the implication” that Berulis had committed a serious crime. It says that implication played out in replies demanding prosecution, jail, harm, or arrest—and that it placed him at “increased risk of physical harm.”

In those replies, the suit points to users calling for Berulis to be prosecuted, including one user who wrote, “Snitches get stitches.”

After the crash, Berulis also encountered the human reality of his fear turning into paperwork and police procedure. A police report viewed by WIRED says that when a police officer from Prince William County arrived at the scene. Berulis’ lawyer from Whistleblower Aid. Andrew Bakaj—who had helped Berulis file his Congressional complaint about DOGE—was also there.

In the days after, Berulis connected the dots between how he was talked about online and what happened to him physically.

“ The correlation was obvious to me, with the timing,” he says.

He also began to worry about the question that has become almost impossible to ignore since the threatening note earlier in April: how whoever was targeting him knew where he lived.

Between the Congressional complaint on April 14. the public NPR appearance the following day. Musk’s resharing of the dispute on April 19 at 8:06 pm. and the crash on April 20 in which his brake lines were found cut. Berulis’ account paints a sequence where a whistleblower allegation quickly transformed into something far more personal—one that. in his words. left him fearing for his life.

NLRB DOGE Elon Musk Dan Berulis whistleblower defamation lawsuit cybersecurity data exfiltration IP address in Russia X post Prince William County police brake lines cut Whistleblower Aid Andrew Bakaj