On a cold February morning in 2025, Elon Musk walked into the National Labor Relations Board's headquarters with a security badge and a handpicked tech team. Within days, network administrators were locked out of their own systems, audit logs vanished, and a sudden 10-gigabyte pulse of sensitive data shot out of the agency like a heartbeat.
"They instructed us not to log the accounts, not to record access, and to stay out of their way."
Daniel Berulis, an IT specialist who had spent 12 years protecting federal systems, watched helplessly. He filed internal reports. He tried to trigger a breach alert. Then, one evening, he came home to a drone hovering outside his window and a printed photo of himself taped to his front door.
The new "Department of Government Efficiency" — DOGE for short — had been framed as an innovation task force to "cut waste and modernize operations." In reality, it became the most brazen access-grab in U.S. government history, a shadow entity that treated data security protocols as optional obstacles.
By the time anyone in Congress realized what was happening, it was too late.
At the Social Security Administration, DOGE operatives embedded themselves deep in the architecture. Musk's close ally Antonio Gracias, whose job description specifically barred him from handling sensitive records, began weaving a new story about voter fraud.
On Fox & Friends, Gracias claimed "millions of illegal immigrants" had stolen Social Security numbers and registered to vote. His numbers were false. His access was unauthorized. But by the time the courts intervened to block DOGE's access, Gracias had already pulled data points from the SSA's internal systems and scattered them across national media.
"Today, the court upheld accountability by mandating DOGE to erase all traces of the data it accessed unlawfully."
Gracias’ claims fueled a rapid push for stricter voter ID laws in GOP-controlled states. Meanwhile, career employees at the SSA, stunned and fearful, watched years of meticulous privacy work torched in a matter of weeks.
"They treated the SSA like a private data warehouse," said one SSA official, speaking anonymously. "We weren't civil servants anymore. We were standing between them and their political narrative."
Inside the Pentagon, the damage wasn't just reputational. It was operational.
In March, a Signal group chat labeled "Houthi PC small group" began buzzing with messages about impending U.S. airstrikes in Yemen. The participants? Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Vice President J.D. Vance—and accidentally, Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic.
"Nobody was texting war plans, and that's all I have to say about that," Hegseth muttered to reporters, a lie immediately dismantled when Goldberg published screenshots of the exact operational details — targets, weapons, timelines — discussed in real time.