A US government agency worker who exposed alleged misuse of data by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) crashed his car after the brakes were cut, court documents show.

Daniel Berulis, an IT employee at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), filed an official whistleblower complaint on 14 April 2025 and went public the next day in an article by NPR.

He alleged that sensitive NLRB data had been compromised due to meddling by DOGE, and said there had been suspicious log-in attempts from an IP address in Russia.

Five days later, he started driving to see his uncle in Maryland, but veered off the road and crashed into a stop sign when he was unable to slow down. He later discovered the brakes had been cut, Wired reported.

A mechanic later found the driver-side airbag sensors had been removed “but noted that the remaining wires had been spliced together” so that the car’s system would not alert the driver, according to a police report filed by Berulis.

Before his whistleblower complaint, he said, a threatening note had been left on his door with pictures of him walking his dog, which appeared to have been taken by a drone.

The night before the crash, Musk shared a post that said DOGE had been “cleared” and that people were calling for the whistleblower to be investigated.

“Filing a deliberately false whistleblower claim is a serious crime,” Musk wrote. Underneath, one user wrote: “Snitches get stitches.”

Berulis is suing Musk for defamation, alleging that the billionaire put him at risk of violence by spreading false claims that he had illegally lied about DOGE.

Berulis’s lawsuit against Musk says that readers of his X post “drew the implication” that Berulis had committed a serious crime. It noted “replies demanding prosecution, jail, harm, or arrest” and said these put Berulis at “increased risk of physical harm”.

After Wired approached him, Musk posted on X that a report showed NLRB’s inspector general’s office “lacked a reasonable belief that [Berulis] was disclosing a violation of law, rule, or regulation” and had closed its investigation.

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