Shortly after taking office, President Donald Trump tasked Elon Musk with using the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to eliminate wasteful spending.

However, fellow tech billionaire Peter Thiel recently suggested that DOGE's work will lead to Democrat-aligned organizations being busted for criminal activity. 

"You could just prosecute these people for fraud"

According to Breitbart, Thiel made that allegation when he spoke late last week with entrepreneur and conservative podcast host Joe Lonsdale.

When Lonsdale spoke of the potential for "scams" involving taxpayer funds by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), Theil said his suspicions were accurate.

The former PayPal CEO declared that "so much of this left-wing philanthropy nonprofit world" was simply "a cover for borderline criminal activity."

"And one of the people who looked at this a lot thinks you could just prosecute these people for fraud," Thiel asserted.

Thiel likens NGO fraud to Iran-Contra scandal

He then went on to reference Iran-Contra, a scandal which involved the illegal sale of weapons to Iran in order to fund anti-communist rebels in Nicaragua.

"Something like this is what Oliver North was prosecuted for in the Iran-Contra scandal in the 80s, was he mischaracterized the money and he mislabeled it. And it was accused of defrauding the government," Thiel stated.

Peter Thiel to @JTLonsdale: DOGE uncovered how certain leftwing NGOs were seemingly fronts for "borderline criminal activity."

"I think you could prosecute thousands of these people, criminally, for the thing they wanted to prosecute Oliver North for in the 80s." pic.twitter.com/kq2tVpBbe2

— Josh Caplan (@joshdcaplan) April 17, 2025

"And I think you could prosecute thousands of these people criminally for the thing that they wanted to prosecute Oliver North for in the 80s," he added.

Musk says NGOs are "one of the biggest sources of fraud"

Interestingly, Musk himself alluded to the existence of fraud on the part of nonprofit groups during an interview in March with Fox Business host and former Trump White House adviser Larry Kudlow.

"We look at the president's executive orders, and we also just follow the money," Musk told Kudlow. "So we started looking closely at USAID because they were completely violating the president's executive orders to suspend foreign aid."

"I think, one of the biggest sources of fraud in the world, is government-funded non-governmental organizations," Musk maintained.

"This is a gigantic fraud loophole where the government can give money to an NGO, and then there are no controls over that NGO," the DOGE head further stated.