IBM comes to praise, not bury, US Government policy as DOGE fails to bite too hard into its bottom line

If anyone was looking for criticism of the Trump 2.0 tariff situation from a tech sector big hitter, it wasn’t forthcoming from IBM yesterday. In fact CEO Arvind Krishna went out of his way to state:

We appreciate the Administration's focus on economic growth and rational regulation, which will strengthen the US competitive position. We believe this will result in long-term value creation and make it easier for technology to contribute to economic growth.

That’s remarkably gracious given that 15 major government contracts, worth around $100 million to IBM, were impacted by the work of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency during Q1 2025. But CFO James Kavanagh said that that the tariff situation - or rather, speculation about their impact as they didn’t kick in until after the end of the quarter - hadn’t caused issues to date:

While still early, through the first ...