- The claim that federal IT staffer Dan Berulis discovered his car brake lines had been cut soon after he filed a whistleblower report alleging activity by members of the Department of Government Efficiency resulted in a "significant cybersecurity breach" is true. In his April 2025 whistleblower report, Berulis noted login attempts from Russia within minutes DOGE engineers creating the accounts.
- On April 19, 2025, tech mogul Elon Musk, who spearheaded DOGE, reposted a
post that read, "NLRB whistleblower caught lying about DOGE data breach." Musk captioned it, "Filing a deliberately false whistleblower claim is a serious crime." Dozens of commenters on both posts appeared to believe Berulis had fabricated his account. - After Berulis lost control of his car on April 20, the police officer who arrived on the scene noted a cut brake line, according to the official police report.
The identity and motivation of the person who cut Berulis' brake line remains undetermined, as of this writing, and police closed the investigation after being unable to identify a suspect. There is no evidence connecting Musk to the incident. - In April 2026, Berulis sued tech billionaire Elon Musk for defamation, alleging he showed "reckless disregard" for whether the accusations that Berulis fabricated his report were accurate. Berulis' defamation lawsuit against Musk is ongoing, as of this writing, and a decision has not yet been reached.
In June 2026, a rumor circulated online that Dan Berulis — a federal information technology staffer who filed a whistleblower report alleging a data breach by members of the Department of Government Efficiency — had his car brake lines cut after
The rumor spread across multiple platforms, including Facebook, Reddit and YouTube. One X post (archived) also claimed Berulis was suing Musk for defamation, reading:
BREAKING: RETALIATION! A DOGE whistleblower had his brake lines cut the day after Elon Musk called him a criminal on X — and he's now suing for defamation.
(X user @OccupyDemocrats)
According to primary evidence Snopes reviewed — including the original whistleblower report, Musk's post, the police report detailing Berulis' cut brake line and images of the cut brake line Berulis said his mechanic provided — we determined that it's true Berulis discovered at least one of his car brake lines had been cut days after he filed the whistleblower report.
As of this writing, much remains unknown about the case. For example, it has not been determined in a court of law whether Musk posting Berulis' identity had any relation to the incident. Police also dropped the investigation determining who cut Berulis' brake line after they were unable to identify a suspect.
Below, we break down the events as they unfolded:
April 14, 2025: Berulis filed whistleblower report
A whistleblower report dated April 14, 2025, indicated Berulis, an IT staffer for the National Labor Relations Board, came forward because of his concern that "recent activity by members of the Department of Government Efficiency ('DOGE') have resulted in a significant cybersecurity breach that likely has and continues to expose our government to foreign intelligence and our nation's adversaries."
Berulis wrote in the report that when DOGE officials arrived at the NLRB in March 2025, they required the highest level of access and unrestricted access to internal systems with "essentially unrestricted permission to read, copy, and alter data." Soon after, he began noticing large spikes in outbound traffic leaving the NLRB network itself, noting it was "extremely unusual because data almost never directly leaves NLRB's databases."
He reported that he began seeing login attempts from outside the U.S. In one instance, within minutes of DOGE personnel creating user accounts in NLRB systems, someone or something with an IP address in Primorskiy Krai, Russia, repeatedly attempted to log in using the correct username and passwords. The logins were unsuccessful only because of the NLRB's "no-out-of-country logins policy," according to Berulis. He wrote that many of these login attempts occurred within 15 minutes of DOGE engineers creating the accounts.
April 15, 2025: Berulis went public, sharing his identity
The next day, Berulis took his claim that DOGE may have released sensitive labor data public in a news release with Whistleblower Aid and other news media outlets, including NPR (archived). The NPR story included photos of Berulis, personal testimony about his childhood love of computers and his thoughts on the contents of his whistleblower report.
"I can't attest to what their end goal was or what they're doing with the data," Berulis told NPR. "But I can tell you that the bits of the puzzle that I can quantify are scary. … This is a very bad picture we're looking at."
NPR reported that internal documentation corroborated Berulis' account, which 11 technical experts across other government agencies and the private sector reportedly reviewed.
According to NPR, the NLRB's internal case management system — from which Berulis observed a spike in data leaving — stores information about ongoing contested labor cases, lists of union activists, internal case notes, personal information including Social Security numbers and home addresses, proprietary corporate data and more information that never gets published openly, concluding that it was unclear what DOGE's intentions for the data were.
Berulis also told NPR that raising concerns internally resulted in someone "physically taping a threatening note" to his door that included overhead photos of him walking his dog.
April 19, 2025: Elon Musk shared post of Berulis
On April 19, Musk reposted a meme stemming from X account @amuse that
NLRB WHISTLEBLOWER CAUGHT LYING ABOUT DOGE DATA BREACH
Daniel J. Berulis claimed that immediately following DOGE being given logins for NLRB's computer systems those same logins were used to send massive amounts of data to Russia. The problem was that when he made his claims the NLRB confirmed that DOGE did not have access to the systems nor had it requested access. The NLRB investigated the reported breach and confirmed that NO breach of agency systems had occurred.
Musk captioned it, "Filing a deliberately false whistleblower claim is a serious crime." Dozens of commenters on both posts appeared to believe Berulis had fabricated his account
April 20, 2025: Berulis' car brake line cut
In a June 2026 article (archived) by Wired, Berulis recounted that on April 20, 2025, he got in his car to drive to see his uncle in Maryland, opting to take local roads instead of the highway. Within approximately five minutes of leaving his house, he was approaching a stop sign and realized his car wouldn't slow down. He reportedly pulled over and hit the stop sign at 1 or 2 mph, according to his lawyer. Upon examining his car, he said he found that his
A police report by the officer who arrived on the scene corroborated this account (PDF Page 12), reading:
Mr. Berulis showed me the alleged brake line. I observed a cut wire under the hood of his vehicle as well as paper stuffed under the wire. I photographed the wires.
The police officer also noted that she dusted the car for fingerprints, collecting three latent fingerprint cards as well as elimination prints from Berulis, and said Berulis provided a video of a drone he observed flying above his house, which flew away when he pointed his camera toward it.
Berulis provided images he said his mechanic took of the cut brake line to Snopes as well as the severed airbag sensor. For privacy reasons, we have not published these images
While some posts about the claim said "brake lines" in the plural, Berulis clarified that the cut component was one tube that holds the fluid for the car's entire brake system.
Police confirmed in an email to Snopes they closed the investigation after being unable to identify a suspect.
April 17, 2026: Berulis filed defamation lawsuit against Musk
A year later, on April 17, 2026, Berulis filed a defamation lawsuit against Musk, alleging he showed "reckless disregard" for whether the accusations made against Berulis were accurate.
"This guy is an introvert. He doesn't want fame," Kel McClanahan, Berulis' lawyer, said in a
Although as of this writing it's unclear who cut Berulis' brake line and what their motivation was, Snopes determined there was sufficient evidence to rate the claim that Berulis discovered at least one of his car's brake lines had been cut after filing the whistleblower report alleging activity by members of DOGE resulted in a "significant cybersecurity breach." Berulis' defamation lawsuit against Musk is ongoing as of this writing.