One of the most pernicious features of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is that, by choosing to name it after that stupid shiba inu, Elon Musk accidentally created something so blindingly boring that it’s hard to look at it long enough to see all the damage it continues to cause. But make no mistake: beneath its TheChive.com humorous surface, DOGE is and has been one of the most malevolent government forces in modern history.
From day one, the DOGE team acted as what it describes as a sledgehammer for any and all facets of the federal government that the administration disagreed with. Presented as a way to combat waste, fraud and abuse, DOGE was used as Trump’s personal cudgel. They laid off tens of thousands of federal employees. They cut humanitarian aid around the world, causing hundreds of thousands of people to deaths so farwith many more to come. DOGE also mishandled Americans’ private data, resulting in multiple Congressional investigations into the department: Investigations of other federal agencies in the administration. refuse to cooperate with.
In 2025, when a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) employee discovered that DOGE appeared to have been compromised and began downloading his agency’s data as well as login attempts coming from a Russian address, he immediately became concerned. The NLRB had not authorized DOGE’s access to that data. DOGE had not even applied for it. Concerned IT worker Dan Berulis made the difficult decision to risk his career and prepared to file a complaint with Congress. What he couldn’t have known at the time was that reporting DOGE would put much more than his job at stake.
The day after her complaint was filed, Berulis went public with her concerns with an exclusive NPR article that revealed his identity. In the interview, Berulis shared that, in the days before he blew the whistle, a threatening note was taped to his door along with what appeared to be drone camera photos of him walking his dog. As reported in CABLINGThese new allegations emerged as part of a defamation lawsuit that Berulis filed against Elon Musk in April of this year and which recently became public.
Just two days after the NPR article, on the evening of April 19, 2025, Musk shared a post on X which claimed Berulis had filed a “deliberately false whistleblowing claim.” Berulis’ case alleges that this false accusation from the richest person on Earth with more than 250 million followers on the social media platform he owns put a target on his back, citing a chilling incident that occurred just hours after Musk shared X.
The next day, when Berulis started driving to see a family member, he quickly realized something was wrong. While approaching a stop sign at an intersection, he found that he was unable to slow his vehicle and drove off the road and into the sign to avoid a multi-car collision. When Berulis inspected the vehicle, he was horrified to learn that the brake lines had been cut.
It took some time for Berulis to learn about Musk’s new post and connect it to his mysterious accident and the threatening note. Realizing this, he no longer felt safe in his home and fled to a hotel before breaking his lease shortly after.
As Berulis told WIRED, the brake lines were likely tampered with “while the car was parked in my driveway. The note came to the house… I didn’t feel safe there at all. I never stayed at that address again.”
Berulis’ defamation case is still ongoing and he acknowledges that coming forward is like “kicking the hornet’s nest” and could put him back in the crosshairs of Musk’s most rabid fans. Despite the potential threats and what he sees as an unlikely victory in court due to “asymmetry,” Berulis hopes something positive will come out of the process, even if that only draws more attention to the damage DOGE has caused and Musk’s role in the carnage.
