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Shark Tank’s Kevin O’Leary was the subject of a live on-air fact check when he erroneously asserted that the federal government was “never audited” for a century as part of his defense of the actions of President Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s DOGE team, with a former congressman pointing out that not only was O’Leary’s claim false, Trump and Musk had fired all the people responsible for overseeing those audits.

O’Leary was on Laura Coates Live Monday evening along with former Rep. Tom Malinowski (D-NJ). Host Laura Coates moderated a discussion between the two about DOGE’s controversial activities so far in the first month of Trump’s second term.

Coates asked Malinowski what he thought about Musk’s “sledgehammer approach” as a way to cut federal spending after O’Leary had defended Musk’s approach — including the mass firings and emails that went out to millions of federal employees — as “not unreasonable.”

The former congressman called O’Leary’s comments “total nuts” because federal employees like FBI agents and air traffic controllers “don’t work for Elon Musk,” noting that even some of his “least favorite people in the Trump administration” still told the people in their agencies to not reply to the email.

“This is not the way that you run

any organization — having some person from outside who has no clue what these people are doing, what the government does,” said Malinowski, and would only bring “absolute havoc” and have a damaging “impact on people’s lives,” citing an example where Musk cut grants to Lutheran charities after seeing a tweet from a conspiracy theorist baseless accusing them of being money launderers, plus his cuts at the FAA.

“He has no idea what these agencies are doing,” said Malinowski. “He doesn’t even ask the question. He goes in and fires people, terminates programs, causes immense harm to people who have been working for years for this country, patriotic Americans, and to the Americans who receive these services, and then he says, ‘oh, whoops, I made a mistake.’ That’s completely unacceptable and should be unacceptable to anyone who loves this country.”

O’Leary retorted that Malinowski was “full of crap” because Musk “has no executional mandate” and “can’t do anything.” He urged “everybody chill out” because Musk was “just simply observing, pointing out, and letting the American people know what he’s found, and if you don’t like it, okay, that’s all right, but he does not have the ability to do what Congress has, to execute on his recommendations.”

Malinowski said he agreed with O&

#8217;Leary that Musk “has no authority to do these things, but he’s doing them there,” citing the “thousands of federal workers who have been fired” and grants that have been frozen. This was both “ridiculous” and “illegal,” according to the former congressman, who was confident the courts would stop it and Congress would have to assert itself as well.

“But Congress has not asserted itself quite well, Tom, and you realize that’s part of the frustration –” Coates interjected.

“I do, and I’ve been talking about that,” Malinowski replied and predicted a “moment of truth in a couple of weeks” when there would be a “big showdown” over the budget and the Republicans would need to get Democrats on board. He added that he expected this would be “resolved one way or another,” and did not think the Supreme Court would allow the executive branch to take over money that had been appropriated by Congress.

The end result, said Malinowski, was that “we’re going to have to spend even more money restoring the services and the jobs and the people that have been broken by this, this ridiculous process. The federal government is not a company that you take over. This may work on Shark Tank, but it’s not a company that you take over and dismantle and sell for

parts because you want to do it in a different way. You have to do things in accordance with the Constitution.”

O’Leary said that the federal government was “dripping with fat ” after “100 years of never being scrutinized, never been examined, never looking for any efficiencies,” and again praised Musk and said he was “not cutting enough.” A little bit later, O’Leary said again that “we’ve never audited government for 100 years.”

“Tom doesn’t think that’s right,” Coates said. “Tom, what’s your reaction to that? That the government is not audited?”

“Every agency, every agency of the federal government — it helps to know some things, if we’re going to have this debate — every agency of the federal government is audited by independent inspectors general,” Malinowski said, mentioning how USAID was audited “over 60 times last year.”

“And one of the first things that Donald Trump and Elon Musk did was to fire all of the inspectors general,” Malinowski continued. “They fired the auditors and they put in charge this billionaire with his 50 child interns who know absolutely nothing about the federal government.”

It did not work to run government like a business, Malinowski argued, because a factory could pause making widgets for a few months while a consultant restructures it, but “

you can’t do that to the FAA unless people aren’t going to fly in planes for the next four or five months. You can’t do that to the Defense Department unless you don’t want to defend this country for the next four or five months. It’s ridiculous that we’re even having this argument, and I’m someone who believes there is waste in government, and there are ways to get at it, but not by firing everybody first, shutting things down while you investigate.”

“Do the investigation, work with Congress, work with these employees,” Malinowski concluded. “Do it right. It’s been done before.”

Watch the clip above via CNN.

Tags: DOGE, Kevin O'Leary, Laura Coates, Tom Malinowski