The Charlie Kirk Show - The Hidden Fraud Draining Main Street ft. Kelly Loeffler

Episode Date: January 15, 2026

Just how much taxpayer money has gone down the drain to scammers? At the Biden-era Small Business Administration, it could be more than $200 billion. New administrator Kelly Loeffler talks about the battle to uncover that fraud and revive genuine American small business. Plus, as protests surge across Iran, Mahyar Tousi explores the question of how many have been killed, how unified the protesters are, and what the prospects are for another quagmire if America gets involved. Watch every episode ad-free on members.charliekirk.com! Get new merch at charliekirkstore.com!Support the show: http://www.charliekirk.com/supportSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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The Charlie Kirk Show is proudly sponsored by Preserve Gold, the leading gold and silver experts and the only precious metals company I recommend to my family, friends, and viewers. All right, welcome hour two of the Charlie Kirk show is underway, and we are turning our sights on Iran. There has been, I would say, divergent. Will he or won't he? Will he or won't he?

And we're talking obviously about whether or not Trump is going to take kinetic military action, fully support, economic, moral support of the Iranian people, all that stuff. There's a huge question about military action. to help us unpack this is Mia Tusi, I hope I got that approximately correct, founder of Tusi TV based out of London, he's Iranian, welcome to the show.

Thank you for my own guys, thank you. Yeah, absolutely. So there's multiple questions swirling right now about the Iranian question if you're an American, right? Will President Trump take action militarily to support the independence movement that is obviously pouring over into the streets? But there's also a question about

how brutal has the regime crackdown on protesters really become? I've seen some reports, quote a number of 2,500 dead, which is already extraordinary, by the way. I've seen other reports that it's 12,000. Do you have any insight on what the accurate figure is? Yeah, so you can't really take any of these, because in the past, we've had a lot of uprisings and crackdowns. I've had hundreds and hundreds, sometimes over a thousand when it comes to the massacre. But obviously, the official figures that the mainstream media keep going with is, you know, a thousand, sometimes 600. On the ground, all the information that we have from the hospitals and the whistleblowers

obviously goes to the idea that it's thousands. There was a leak from the inner circle of Ali Khamenade, Supreme Leader, a few days ago, and the documents signed by him, the direct order, and they believe they themselves that it was about 12,000. Now, there are also unofficial figures that just come out, That is closer to 20,000. But as President Trump said, even one is enough. And that is the main argument.

Right now, the mainstream media wants to get into the debate of, well, if it's 2000 instead of 4,000, then is it really our business? That's the problem. Right. There is sort of a, it's a weird math you have to contemplate if you're going to consider military action. Is there a threshold? Is there a, I mean, it's an awkward question to ask.

But certainly when you're dealing with Iran that has a history of squashing uprisings often violently with lethal force, this is not necessarily something new, but this is new because of the scale and the scope and just how widespread these protests have become in Iran. Why don't you take us into that psychology about what is driving these protests? Why is this unique? Why is this new? And why does this maybe portend an actual change in leadership in Iran? Yeah.

So firstly, when it comes to any potential action by the U.S., and President Trump, it's not really just about the scale of the uprising, which I'll get into. It's also about how dangerous the Islamic Republic has become to the world, including to President Trump directly, because they tried to assassinate him a couple of times over the last couple of years. The reality of the situation is that this uprising was, obviously,

building up for a very long time. They have had attempts of uprisings. And, of course, there's been massive crackdowns because the regime, as the Iranians would call them, the Islamic occupation regime, They don't really care. They would just kill everybody. But this time round, the regime is extremely weak. The trigger point was when the currency in Iran collapsed.

And that was over two weeks ago, almost three weeks ago. And of course, there's the lack of water, lack of electricity, lack of money, lack of jobs, and lack of recognition on the international stage. And people said, enough is enough. This time round, it wasn't just anger. They are very, very motivated. and they know they've got nothing else to lose. Usually in the past, when you kill a few hundred people,

people would go home, they get scared. But after thousands who've been massacred, people continue to stay out because they also finally have a unifying leader in the Crown Prince Vazapalabi, and President Trump until now has had their backs, which has really helped people on the ground. But they definitely need support as soon as possible.

So is there an ideological platform that, you know, yikes these people, other than wanting to overthrow the current government? Like do we have let's just be right, are there Islamists who also oppose the government? And also are there steps the government could take to try to mollify this

short of regime change? Short of total collapse. Like I guess apparently I learned recently there actually is a council of clerics that could for lack of a better term, fire the Ayatollah and say here's a new one. Could something like that happen? No, no. So there people keep comparing

it to Gorbachev and Soviet Union. It's very, very different because this is a cult of personality behind one figurehead. And the reality is they basically pretended to do what you just said, like reforming from within, things like that over the last few uprisings. People know that this is an occupation since 1979. There was a paramilitary occupation that basically resulted thanks to Jimmy Carter, US Democrats, MI6, the Fifth Republic in France, that basically decided, let's get behind the Ayatollahs,

because they were scared that the Soviet Union in the middle of Cold War are going to take over Iran in the 70s. So they thought, let's back these guys. They seem to be stupid enough. They can be controlled as puppets. That backfired because the next day, the Islamists went on and chanted death to America. Right now, your question about, you know,

in terms of power vacuum or who is involved, Iran is very different to countries like Libya or Iraq or Syria. There are no extremist groups in that sense. There is no vacuum because people finally are behind, united behind one concept. Even if not necessarily the crown prince, which is true, they are all united behind the original flag of Iran, the history, the heritage, they simply won their country back.

It's more similar to the situation in Poland after the national socialist in Germany got kicked out, and then again, after the communist from Soviet Union got kicked out, Poland said we just got our country back. That's basically their fight. It's not necessarily like Iraq or Syria. There are no really extremist groups. There is a tiny group called Mujat,

Jahedin, M.E.K. And there are about 13 of them. They're smaller than the Green Party. Nobody cares about them. But that's the main goal that, you know, people don't really care about those guys. They are basically a Marxist Islamic group. They used to be with the IRGIS in the 70s against the king. But then they split. They basically had a fight. And now they also want to bring down the regime because they want to have a different version of communist Islamic Republic. That is the biggest problem. Well, what about another concern I know we've seen is America's repeatedly had some involvement in the Middle East where you topple a government and then our own government is surprised to learn, oh, wait, there's a lot of ethnic grievances in this society. This happened in Iraq. Notariously, President Bush apparently didn't quite get the Sunni Shia split before we actually intervened. We've seen it, of course, in Syria. Lebanon is basically defined by those splits. I know in Iran, there's Aziris as well as historical. Iranians, there's other smaller groups. Is there any risk of a crack up along those lines if there's a power vacuum? So this was a worry a couple of decades ago. In fact, under the Islamic Republic, these different ethnic groups and regional groups were essentially being divided. But over the last few years, the movement against the Islamic Republic has actually united them. You've got the Persian-Iranians, so that's my ethnicity, but you've got the Kurdish-Iranians, Azaris, and all the others. Even the Kurds, in Iran, compared to the

Kurds in Turkey or other places, they are actually calling for a united Iran, and they're calling for the Crown Prince to return. So all these other ethnic groups and other religious groups are getting together. So ironically, the I obviously have united them. But again, as I mentioned, it's very different to the situation in Iraq, but it's the liberal mainstream media that are not helping the situation. They continue to spread this propaganda. For example, CNN and many others have been calling it economic protests when it's an actual uprising. They're literally calling for the overthrow of the regime, but at least they're calling it something compared to certain of the people, the self-appointed

queens of expertise, like Candace Owens, who are saying that there are no protests. There is no uprising. It's just a sigh of by the Jews. She literally said that yesterday, and that is embarrassing. There are millions of people in Iran who are currently under occupation. Tens of thousands have been killed, at least thousands have been killed, and apparently it's just the Jews. But right now, people in Iran have called for the support of both the Crown Prince as their leader and the president of the United States. It's different to 10 years ago. If you had told me five years ago, 10 years ago, would you like the U.S. to get involved?

I would have said probably not because you need the consent of the public. You need that consensus. And they know they don't really want boots on the ground. They don't want to put U.S. soldiers at risk. You simply need to have a strategic, precise, targeted attack, similar to when recently they picked up a Madora. That's why. As America turns 250 this year, I want to take a moment to remember the people who help build it,

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We've got a lot more questions for our great guests. A lot more questions for our guests. And we were talking a lot about the Shah going in. You were saying that there's large, there's actually almost unanimous support for the Shah. But I guess my first question is, what does that actually mean? Because my understanding is that Razapalavi has basically just said, I'm willing to be a constitutional monarch. And so then what would that mean? And could we get Islamist parties running in the election who would then act on his behalf?

Or is there a platform that exists other than reinstall this old monarch? Well, that's a very good question, actually, because their propaganda has been for decades, and especially recently that, oh, you can't bring back the king, because that's absolute monarchy, that's dictatorship. Not really. This is the 21st century. It works in Britain, more modern Britain, technically, a constitution monarchy and actually having parliamentary democracy. and it's going to work in Iran

because these two countries have had the history and the heritage. If I were to create a new country from scratch, I'll probably create more of an American model with the Constitution and everything else because the Republican America has the good checks and balances. But in those cultures, Constitutional monarchy works. And your question is actually very important

because what is the limits? Because the Crown Prince, his values are liberal democracy and, of course, freedom and free speech. Does that have to be a line when it comes to certain groups or ideologies being restricted? Or do you just allow it to happen? So my personal opinion is that it's a very gray area

because, yes, my instinct would say, yeah, probably ban radical communists and ban Islamists, radical Islamists, from having a party, but then doesn't that create a bigger problem in terms of underground movement? But I don't really think there's any problem overall in the cultures like Iran.

They don't really have Islamist problems and they don't really have communist problems. They are socialists like any other country. And generally speaking, the culture, obviously around 30% of Iran are Muslim, practicing Muslim. And they're all Shia. They're not necessarily ISIS Al-Qaeda.

Apologies for the connection, by the way. And so I'm not really afraid of that, but I think if you're going to go with liberal democracy, you're just going to have to allow people to have the freedom to set up their parties and basically have the checks and balances to ensure that the monarch prevents anybody from becoming a tyrant. So, Myr-Tusi, founder of Tusi-TV,

Thank you again. This has been a fascinating discussion. I have a kind of a pointed question. I'm just going to preface at the top. So we had Elica Laban on another Iranian, perhaps you know her, and she stated to us that the protests will be successful only with outside intervention. It felt like a direct pitch for American intervention. I, you know, am American. I'm born here, raised here, probably going to be probably going to die here. My kids are born here. I care about America. Okay. And forgive me if I have not heard this story before, and it feels like we perhaps, perhaps, there is a propaganda or a messaging campaign going on that wants to sort of, you know, lead us down the path of another foreign intervention. Now, I've heard you say that this is different. This is not like Libya. This is not like Iraq. And I actually do believe you. And I actually am convinced of that that Iran is different. I support economic warfare to bring down the regime. I support moral support from afar. How am I to interpret these signals, though, that we are perhaps getting dog-walked into another foreign conflict in the Middle East when we have our own problems

here at home? And what would your ask of the United States be? Yes. The Americans should put America first, and you should not really get dragged into different wars. And as I said, I'm not advocating for the U.S. troops to boot on the ground. Iranians are not asking that either. This is not Iraq in 2003. On one hand, on a more kind of personal, emotional level, I would say in my own subjective opinion, well, the US government in 79 with Jimmy Carter caused this chaos, not necessarily just for the Iranians, for themselves and for the region. You create instability and an enemy. It will be nice if you could fix it for yourself, at least. But you don't have to directly do regime change, because the people are ready to finish the job. Right now, the priorities

to just stop the killings and paralyze the regime. And the hope is that those inside the Iranian military who are saying they are defecting, they can defect and they can continue and finish the revolution. That is a priority. I'm not asking for President Trump to come in and take over Iran and force them to change their regime. Simply help the people to finish the job that they want to do

because whether we like it or not, this is the American Empire and the United States is the world place. It doesn't have to mean that American soldiers' lives should be at risk every single day. doesn't mean the Americans have to be involved with every war. But if America is not keeping an eye on the world, the Chinese will. Well, so one quick question, and we're nearing the end here so you can make a quick response. But if you say our goal is to stop the killings, what would be the military strike America could do that would stop the killings?

Is there a particular place? Is there a particular target? Well, the president has been presented with about 50 targets, apparently. I'm not really sure exactly what specific targets they have. But overall, you obviously have a lot of IR. RGC bases. You have a lot of government buildings. You have the actual generals. CIA know where they are. The Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei is currently in a bunker in east of Iran in Tabbas. So if they go for those things or if they could pick up Khamenei and give him an Uber lift like with Medora, that would be nice.

Because he has to face justice. He has to actually stand on trial just like the National Socialists did in Germany. but if you paralyze the actual IRGC, we believe that there are people in the military, the actual military, the army of Iran, who are ready to take control until the Crown Prince returns to his country and that they can have a referendum on their future constitution. Well, fair enough.

I mean, you know, listen, the president, to your point, has been presented a suite of options from diplomatic options to military options. And listen, we stand with the people of Iran. We would love to correct the wrong of 1970. and having Iran that we can work with and that was welcome back into the international community.

Those things are all, we're completely in agreement. We'll see what happens. The position of this show is we've learned to trust Trump's instincts on some of these things. So thank you for joining us. Thank you for that analysis. This is very, very fascinating. Think about it. Every single dollar you spend is either supporting your values or working against them.

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We are honored by an in-studio guest and that is Kelly Leffler, 28th Administrator. I always have, I love it. Administrator. Of the small business administration, so SBA. And we were joking because it's like we need to change the titles. Yeah. Do we call you administrator left? Well, you can call me Kelly. That's my Twitter handle, SBA, Kelly. I'm so honored to serve in the Trump administration. I don't care what my title is as long as I'm a part of it.

Yeah. Well, I was struggling. Kelly, I was struggling with, Kelly, I was struggling with, Kelly, I was struggling with, with Lee, who's the administrator of the EPA. And I was like, Lee, you know, I just got to, you know, we defaulted to, you know, call them leave. Anyways, they might as well call us bureaucrats. I know, right? Thanks for joining us. Yes. Yes. So Kelly Leffler. former senator you have a rich history in the state of Georgia you are now in the Trump administration but you know we were we were joking i think the best place to start for our audience is for you just describe what the small business administration does well you're right Andrew as we were talking a lot of people don't know the small business administration is essentially a public private partnership we're not giving grants out to small businesses we're providing a government guarantee on commercial loans for your local community banker to have the incentive to make that loan to a startup business, to help that community have flourishing small businesses, have an ecosystem of startups and expansion.

And that goes into even manufacturing. Most manufacturers in America meet the small business threshold. What is the threshold? Well, it depends on your industry, but for manufacturing, you can have up to 1,500 employees, as long as you're not over the net worth level. And that's why 98% of America's manufacturers qualify as small businesses. I just came from a great small business manufacturing startup in Tempe just down the road. And this is the heartbeat of America.

And you've got everything bringing to bear there from the capital that SBA provided for this facility to the skilled workforce. You know, I met some of the contractors there in hard hats. And this is what it's all about in the Trump. administration, his economic agenda is going to create more and more of that. That's why we set a record in 2025 of putting out 85,000 small business loans totaling $45 billion. The economic multiplier effect of getting $85 billion out is huge in the economy. There's also a trade deficit. This is a lot of news this morning. So the U.S. trade deficit is one of its lowest points in at least recent memory last couple decades. You put up a tweet here at 370. The trade

deficit has reached its lowest level in nearly two decades, while our exports hit a record high of $302 billion. So President Trump's fair trade policy is restoring America's industrial dominance and straits. So obviously we have much further to go. But, you know, and then we've got this tariff question that is looming. The Supreme Court's going to rule on that. I do believe even just we had John Carney on Breitbart economics editor there saying that even if the Supreme Court rules against there's other levels, levers that Trump administration can pull to still, you know, enact tariffs because they are powerful. How have you seen those play out with small businesses? Because, you know, some small businesses are probably going to see a negative impact, but a lot are going to see a positive impact. Absolutely. I mean, I've crossed this country from Alaska to Maine, walking factory floors, talking to builders, entrepreneurs.

Look, when you hear the word tariff, think fair trade. And that's what this country has not. had. And I am just grateful for President Trump for his courage and his vision to believe in American industry to help us re-industrialize. And you look at every part of the Trump economic agenda from tax cuts to deregulation to generating a skilled workforce and those incentives to get back in the workforce. And you see the building of this boom on top of the $18 trillion coming in. So look, tariffs are just one piece of it, but they're an important piece that we haven't had. Everyone forgets that Biden had a rose garden ceremony, adding tariffs to China during his term, that the Democrats never protested. It felt like this crazy scenario where America was just willing to get fleeced in countless ways because we were, we had like almost like this guilt about being the richest, most powerful nation.

So we didn't feel that we had the moral standing to exert our force to benefit our own people. So we just let everybody else have, you know, trade barriers to us. we let everybody else bilk off the American military, and President Trump is rebalancing those relationships. I've been completely in favor of President Trump's tariff agenda from the start. I think Blake, you've had some questions. This is typically the yin and yang that we play here on the show. Blake's the contrarian.

I'm sort of like more on board with a lot of the mag agenda. You're the narrative acceptor. I am now. Okay. Listen. Okay. All right. Now we're going to get in the debate here in front of Kelly, and I don't want to do that to her.

But here's the thing, though. I do agree with that. But then so SBA is this engine sort of behind the scenes, providing capital, you know, taking some of the risk out of these capital arrangements with riskier small business startups. But then there's this other side of it that you've inherited where there is fraud that you are uncovering. Now we're talking about Somali fraud. We're talking about foreigners coming in, again, bilking off the system. What have you uncovered? What are you investigating right now?

Well, that's right. I mean, from day one, we came in and I said, I will have a zero tolerance policy on fraud. We convened a task force right away. I called for an audit of the agency. The agency hadn't passed an audit in four years. And President Trump likes to say, you're the biggest bank in the country. Well, guess what? The biggest bank in the country is going to finally have an audit or we're accountable for the shortcomings. That includes investigating fraud. We need the number on this. Yeah, headline right here. SBA investigating $1.2 trillion. That is with a T. We've seen a lot of bees floating around with Somali fraud, 9, 19 billion, whatever the number they're saying. And to give a number unsuspected fraud specifically, their internal watchdog in 2020. So this is Biden era, they said, about estimated $200 billion in potential fraud with the PPP loans. Oh, was that all run through SBA?

That it was. That's the $1.2 trillion that ran through SBA during COVID. Well, our own OIG said that about $200 billion was marked as fraudulent. And guess what the Biden administration. did they started forgiving it sweeping it under the rug exactly right blake and so we came in and said we're going back we're looking at it all and that's what we did when it came to minnesota as soon as that came on the radar i asked the team to dig through the minnesota loans they immediately found about seven thousand borrowers 400 million in fraudulent loans in Minnesota alone that tells you that there

are billions and billions out the door fraudulently to thousands that should never touch sba services again and they need to be referred to the DOJ and that's what we're doing. Are these mostly Somali networks or is it kind of across the board? It's widespread. We're investigating further to see how systemic it is because the level of fraud is almost organized. And I've called it organized crime in some cases. And we need to look across all government programs and see where people are systemically defrauding the government. It's a thing that stands out about this, which is if you or I were to say, okay, I want to scam Medicaid.

and you just went to 20 people we know and said, hey, I have an idea to scam Medicaid. One, a lot I think would say no. I think they'd all say no. And some of them might say, I'm going to call the police. I think this is a crime. And when you have some communities that we've voluntarily brought into our country where that's just not the natural reaction,

where they'll either 100% say nothing or a lot of them will help you. Well, because they don't feel culturally tied or their heritage is not tied to the proud culture that we have. It's wrong to scam your cousin or your brother. but not to scam the government. And to your point, I totally agree that it is organized because, you know, we think of organized crime as the Italian mafia. But so often it's these, an immigrant cabal. Well, yes, exactly. But, but that's, you know, those are the movies and, you know, it's been, it's been sensationalized. But so often it's just more subtle than that. It's, it's a cousin calling a cousin saying, here, listen, I figured out this way. You should go set up your own, you know, child care center over here. You should do this. Or listen, we found a way to smuggle all this money back to Somalia. It's more subtle. It's less dramatic, less, you know, movie Hollywood, but it's massively insidious and widespread. Well, especially when there's no oversight. And so we are going to go state by state and look for those states like Minnesota that really, as their largest expenditure, is welfare. And in the federal government, I'm talking, that's at the state level.

In the federal government, we operate about a trillion dollars worth of welfare programs across 80 unique systems. And so we really need to have a hard look at that. that's what's great about the working families tax cut that was passed this year. There's a lot of verification that's now required. There's work requirements. We're going to start cracking down on this very systemically ourselves because we can't trust the states to do it, particularly those like California, Illinois, Minnesota, and others who've shown a willful disdain for taxpayer dollars. By the way, small businesses are some of the biggest taxpayers. And so that's part of my advocacy, is to say I'm going to make sure these programs are going to deserving job creators on Main Street.

Yeah, and it's like you know them when you see them. You know the real deal companies that should be getting the backing of the SBA. And here's President Trump, just having your back here, cut 313. He's suspending SBA loans. It sounds like specifically with scammers in Minnesota, 313. We have also suspended nearly 8,000 SBA loans, small business association loans, two suspected scammers in Minnesota, of which there are many. It's a great state. It was a great state. Now it's getting destroyed by that stupid governor. What a stupid guy he is. But he's a crook. I mean, he's a incompetent guy, but he's a crook. He allowed this to go. You can't have corruption in a scale that nobody's ever seen before. And you're sitting as a governor and you don't know what's going on. It's impossible, even though he's a stupid guy.

It's a really important, you know, I love this about President Trump, that he gets, his instincts are almost always right. So when you guys are at the SBA are working on rooting out this fraud, auditing it, this task force, have you gotten any cooperation from the state of Minnesota? Well, of course not. And we've even had other state governors attack us for looking into Minnesota. So that tells you, it lays another pretty strong trail of breadcrumbs. And we're going to continue to do that. The president has been right about everything. He's right about fraud.

And we're going to continue to do it because, first of all, it's right for the taxpayers. And second of all, it's creating an incentive system when it goes unchecked to do it even more. So imagine that if 20 percent, as Treasury Secretary Besson said, 20 percent of all these programs are fraudulent, someday it could become 30 percent of an even larger number because these programs continue to grow. Well, in COVID really, I mean, Blake, you know, calling me the normie. Lake was actually the guide that during some of the aftermath of COVID and these loans that went out and the scam artists that would set up like a transportation company. And it was like, I mean, this became a meme online because you could all spot it how it was, you know, what it was, what it looked like. You could find obvious scam businesses.

One employee very recently created and consulting. Exactly. A leering center. Exactly. Yeah. And so COVID unleashed a lot of this. And I think you're completely right. administrator Leffler.

Kelly. Kelly. That when you do not police this, you're only going to incentivize the creation of more and more and more fraud. Well, and that's our commitment to small businesses and taxpayers is that we're just getting started. We're not letting up. We're not like dusting off our hands and saying we've sent it over to the DOJ. This has given us a playbook, really a blueprint of how we go state by state now and how we handle this. This needs to become an expertise of the government is tracking down fraud.

Well, I'm going to be saying prayers for you when you start cracking the books on California and New York. This is Lane Schoenberger, Chief Investment Officer and founding partner of Y ReFi. It has been an honor and a privilege to partner with Turning Point and for Charlie to endorse us. His endorsement means the world to us, and we look forward to continuing our partnership with Turning Point for years to come. Now, hear Charlie in his own words tell you about Y Refi. I'm going to tell you guys about YREFI.com. Y-R-E-F-Y-Y-F-Y-F-Y-R-E-F-Y-F-Y-FI-R-E-F-I-R-E-F-I-D-N-A-R-D-N-A-R-D-R-D-R-E-F-I-R-E-F-I-R-D-R-E-F-I-R-D-R-E-F-I-L-LOR. You can get a refunds with a penalty. You can even skip a payment up to 12 times without penalty.

It may not be available in all 50 states. Go to Y-R-R-R-E-F-Y-com. That is Y-R-R-E-F-Y-D-com. Let's face it, if you have distress or default to student loans, it can be overwhelming. Because of private student loan debt, so many people feel stuck. Go to yrefi.com. That is y-refiF-com. Private student loan debt relief, yrefi.com. We are joined by Kelly Leffler. She's the administrator of the Small Business Administration, which is the biggest bank in the country.

People don't realize just how much power the SBA wields to help the economy. and now you're rooting out fraud. Blake has a really good question, though, about a certain variety of loans. Yeah, another part of your portfolio. So there is, it's not super famous, but it's called a 8A certification. It's basically being certified as a disadvantaged firm.

Someone would say minority owned, but can also be women owned or certain other groupings. And it makes you eligible for favorable federal treatment. And it's getting noticed. noticed by a lot of people, especially online, this is a vector the federal government has used for, let's just call it, DEI, or as we say on the show, anti-white discrimination, anti-white male discrimination. And my understanding is this does still exist within the SBA. So could you talk to us a bit about that? Like, you're right. Now, let's just level set on what small businesses. It makes up

99% of all businesses in this country. And under President Trump, we have a record 36 million. there's a group of small businesses that are under statute entitled to about 5% statutorily of federal contracting. So small businesses that are socially and economically disadvantaged. Well, under Biden, they tripled that target to 15% and it created a big vacuum for veteran-owned businesses to get federal contracts. Well, what we found in that was it was a front for shell and pass-through companies to put someone in front of the business. and say that they were a small business, that they were socially and economically, they self-certified, that they were disadvantaged, and then they were able to get these huge contracts. Now, when Kamala was searching out root causes, she put, of immigration, illegal immigration, she put a $700 million contract out, and it ended up coming through bribery. The DOJ is investigating it through an 8-A program.

Now, that's not a small business that does a $700 million contract. And there's other ones. I remember, I think when that hurricane hit Puerto Rico a decade ago, there was an issue where they hired like a one, it was a, I think a black woman owned a company to supply like 50,000 meals to the island. And that was a disaster. And it never happened. And I have, I personally had friends who have set up a business to get a government contract where they just cut in a guy who was part Native American or something and said, you get 51% of it. We'll do the work. We get our cut. You get your cut. It just seems to clearly incentivize that. And so I guess as you say, Congress requires this to exist. But they don't require it to be rife with abuse. It has never been audited in its 45-year history. It came in under Carter. We are conducting the first audit in 45 years. And what we've already found is a lot of malfeasance, a lot of fraud.

We're going to get to the bottom of it. We're going to clean up the program and make sure deserving entrepreneurs get these opportunities. So this brings up this. It's been percolating, bubbling up a little. bit because of all this fraud and this is a reintroduction of this conversation about doge i thought doge was amazing charlie always loved doge because it changed the culture and the focus in dc to actually start rooting some of this stuff out but then you have this falling out between elan musk even Elon and scott besant and it got all messy we acknowledge that but there is a coming back together i mean

uh pete hickset just announced a partnership with grok and xa i what so what what is going on with Doge how would you guys at SBA use it how did you use it and can we can we reignite this culture to root out some of this fraud yeah Doge was incredibly important in kicking off what is accountability in government it helped us facilitate a lot of the changes that we made very very quickly and the mindset remains in this administration which is right-sizing the government we've cut our agency by 52% in terms of headcount 30% by spending in just the first year, and we've done more business than ever.

That is a doge mindset, and that's what we have to continue to have. I hope that it will stay within every agency in terms of what they look at is data. We simply go through and look at the data and accountability. Who's doing what and what are the results? Now, is Palantir involved in this? Well, separately. I know there's been a lot of like. There's a lot of weird theories about Palantiracies around Palantir.

Basically what Palantir is, as far as I understand, send us to your emails, Freedom at Charlie Kirk.com, if you think I'm wrong. wrong. It's basically getting databases to talk to one another. So you cross-reference different agencies and what they know and you can root out fraud that way, which seems very common sense to me. I actually independently brought on Palantir because this scale of the fraud that we're looking at is so vital that we use AI, that we are data-driven in our analytics, and then we have this support externally because there's a lot of resistance internally to right-sizing the federal government and tracking down fraud. How big is your staff? Well, we've gone from about

8,000 to about 4,000 now. Wow. So we do more with less. We're like a small business. We're very efficient to have the economic impact that we do. We estimate it's about a trillion dollars annually when you take a leverage impact of putting out $100 billion a year. I should say a trillion dollars over the four-year term of President Trump.

And it's meaningful on Main Street because small businesses create two out of every three new jobs. Wow. I mean, I'll just be honest. I'm sort of sitting here feeling educated. I hope the audience is getting a lot out of this because I candidly didn't fixate on SBA that much. I didn't think about it that much. But it's apparent, I mean, if Trump's calling you the biggest bank in the country, that says a lot.

He knows banks. He knows banks. I think he's being kind, but I think he knows how important small business and Main Street is. He always says to me, Kelly, small business is big business. He loves our job creators. Like I said, I just came from a construction site, hard hats and everything. These are the people who make this country great. And we've got to support them and get big government out.

of the way and get back to supporting free enterprise. Well, in this, is ridding it of this DEI stuff, this anti-white garbage, ridding of it the fraud. I mentioned Scott Besson before. Let's go ahead and play this. I think this is from yesterday, the day before. He's talking about how much fraud we're dealing with. 384.

We are going to hold people accountable. We're going to press this to the full extent possible. For American taxpayers, for American families, the G.A. the general accounting office believes that there is somewhere between three and 600 billion of annual fraud roughly 10% of government spending that disappears due to fraud if we can recapture that that is one to two percent of GDP so Kelly let's end this where Scott ended this economics the the economy it's rip-roaring but it Scott has also said we were setting the table in 2025 this

year we get to enjoy the feast and the banquet. Are you seeing that? Absolutely. I see it every day. I mean, the Trump economic agenda is rocket fuel for Main Street for this country. We see GDP growth. We see wage growth. Inflation coming down, interest rates coming down. These factors together with deregulating is making sure that this economy is prime for 2026 and beyond. We're just getting started, $18 trillion pouring into this country in investment. We've never seen anything like it. Yeah. And all the data centers, the AI, the crypto, the small businesses. And by the way, if you're deploying capital more efficiently to better operators and you're getting rid of this DEI garbage, you're going to end up getting a bigger multiplier force multiplier on the backside. It's going to have a bigger economic impact.

Well, we're running out of time. I feel like I could keep talking about it for a long time, Kelly. But thank you for joining us. It's been an honor to have you in the studio. Thanks for visiting Phoenix and doing all this great work for the administration. Thank you both. For more on many of these stories and news you can trust. Go to Charlie Kirk, com.