In the wake of repeated comments from Elon Musk calling non-governmental organizations “one of the biggest sources of fraud in the world,” the House Department of Government Efficiency subcommittee held a hearing Wednesday further exploring the nature of their relationship to the government.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., called NGOs the “fifth branch of government” in her opening remarks.
“If the permanent bureaucracy is the de facto fourth branch of the government, then these leftist NGOs are the fifth,” Greene said.
Non-governmental organizations are non-profits that typically focus on addressing social, humanitarian, environmental or economic development issues, sometimes internationally.
Their missions are often government-adjacent and often contract with the government to carry out government programs, while still operating independently, they’re referred to as “non-governmental.”
However, Greene highlighted that NGOs can receive most – sometimes, nearly all – of their funding from government grants or contracts and then individuals within that organization can donate to the political campaigns of the party that helped secure their funding.
“The scheme works in a cycle… Democrat administration officials work with leftist NGOs to implement programs in a manner that ensures those NGOs receive massive grants and contracts. The leaders of those recipient groups then turn around and donate to Democrat political campaigns,” Greene said.
And because they often work so closely with the government, NGOs can significantly influence federal agency policies and practices.
“Federal agencies fund the NGOs, and the NGOs shape the agency’s behavior. It can be hard to tell, to tell where the government ends and the NGO begins. The nonprofits essentially serve as an arm of the government,” Greene said.
The end of the cycle is completed by political appointees who leave government work or are pushed out through administration changes who then go to work for one of the NGOs they partnered with in government. They then donate their “cushy salary to campaigns,” according to Greene.
However, because NGOs aren’t government entities, they’re not subject to the same kind of oversight or accountability as government agencies.
Diane Yentel, president of the National Council of Nonprofits, testified in defense of NGOs. Despite non-profits providing help to “all Americans” of “every political persuasion,” Yentel said that non-profits are being targeted by the Trump administration for political reasons.
“Across the country, nonprofits are having federal funding slashed or eliminated,” Yentel said, “due to arbitrary cuts of congressionally approved spending.”
“There are repeated threats against nonprofits that hold views that don’t align with this administration from statements calling for the illegal, unilateral revoking of their tax-exempt status, to attempted takeovers, audits and even threats of civil or criminal investigations by the federal government, not for any wrongdoing, but for doing work at odds with the administration’s ideology,” Yentel continued.
Ranking committee member Melanie Stansbury, D-N.M., said that the Trump administration was “withholding a half trillion dollars illegally” from nonprofits, as federal funding freezes, DOGE-driven contract cuts and other executive actions have directly impacted nonprofits.
“The truth is simple, neither the president nor any other executive branch official has the power to unilaterally revoke an organization’s tax exempt status or to use these authoritarian tactics to try to intimidate our nonprofit and civil society organizations,” Stansbury said.
The president has threatened to revoke Harvard University’s tax-exempt status and has questioned the tax-exempt status of other organizations.
Stansbury maintained in her closing remarks that the administration is trying to justify illegal action against nonprofits it disagrees with politically, and Greene contended that Democrats have used the lack of oversight NGOs have to enrich friends and accomplish illicit activity.
