The White House scrambled to claim "no harm, no foul." Experts weren’t so generous.
"You never put war plans on a chat app — that's rule number one," said Rep. Jason Crow, a former Army Ranger.
But under the Musk-inspired tech ethos inside Trump's second-term administration, encryption apps like Signal weren't security risks. They were tools of "disruption," lauded for speed over accountability. Messages deleted themselves; records disappeared. Mistakes, when they happened, could be disavowed with a shrug.
Only this time, the mistake broadcasted classified plans to an unintended observer.
Within the White House, the official line remained stubborn: DOGE was about "cutting costs," not cutting corners. Yet from the NLRB breach to the SSA data grab to the Pentagon leak, the pattern was impossible to ignore.
DOGE didn’t operate within agencies. It operated over them — demanding access, overriding security protocols, intimidating employees, and walking out with terabytes of information no ordinary audit could trace.
"Independent science censored. Civil rights protections erased. Now even government databases are being weaponized."
At the NLRB, cybersecurity veterans privately compared DOGE’s behavior to "state-sponsored adversary tactics." Disabling MFA. Erasing audit trails. Exporting sensitive files under cover of "efficiency reviews."
One internal memo, later leaked to Reuters, stated bluntly: "DOGE's activities meet several threshold indicators for a nation-state breach, including credential theft, stealth data exfiltration, and obstruction of reporting."
The scariest part wasn’t just what DOGE took. It was what DOGE left behind: a crater of compromised trust, decimated security frameworks, and a pervasive sense that nothing, not even the federal government's internal defenses, could stop them.
In the weeks following Berulis’ whistleblower complaint, Congress convened emergency hearings. Elon Musk was subpoenaed. Antonio Gracias ducked questions behind his legal team. Defense Secretary Hegseth quietly circulated a resignation letter, then tore it up.
Nothing moved fast enough.
"We’re seeing data that is traditionally safeguarded with the highest standards in the United States government being taken," Berulis warned in closed testimony. "And those who resist are being removed one by one."
In the absence of immediate accountability, the breaches continued.
A second attempted login from a Russian IP address was logged at the Department of Energy. An unreviewed JFK files dump exposed Social Security numbers of intelligence staffers. Signal group chats among DHS officials revealed operational plans for immigrant deportation raids.
"This isn’t politics as usual," said one former NSC cybersecurity advisor. "It’s a slow dismantling of American freedom."