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DOGE says it’s saved $55B; data show much less

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The federal cost-cutting effort dubbed the Department of Government Efficiency says it has saved $55 billion in federal spending so far, but its website accounts for only $16.6 billion of that. 

And that’s before factoring in an error in the data published on DOGE’s website that mislabels a contract as $8 billion, which was later corrected in the federal database to only be $8 million. That cuts nearly in half the total of DOGE’s itemized savings, including from contracts and leases, to about $8.6 billion.

Elon Musk — President Donald Trump’s advisor who has been the figurehead of DOGE — has pledged that the cost-cutting enterprise would provide “maximum transparency” and that “all of our actions are fully public.” 

But DOGE’s accounting raises questions about the reliability of its self-reporting and its level of accountability. Despite its name, it’s not a department, but rather an office within the White House that operates outside the gaze of traditional federal watchdogs, including inspectors general.

Musk’s role in the enterprise has also raised conflict-of-interest questions. His company SpaceX has received billions of dollars in federal contracts. Trump has said Musk will police himself if there are conflicts related to the six companies he runs. The billionaire entrepreneur is required to file a federal financial disclosure, but it will not be made public.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment. DOGE, on its website detailing the listed savings, says it’s working to upload all data “in a digestible and fully transparent manner with clear assumptions, consistent with applicable rules and regulations.” Some contract final termination notices may also have as much as a one-month lag before being posted publicly, it said. 

Musk, speaking to reporters in the Oval Office last week, said that some of the things he says “will be incorrect and should be corrected,” adding that DOGE would act quickly to fix errors.

DOGE has swiftly moved through the federal government canceling contracts and cutting thousands of employees across agencies — and at times moving to quickly re-hire employees who had just been terminated. 

Their work has been largely shrouded in secrecy about who is involved and what they are doing. In a court filing this week, the Trump administration asserted that Musk doesn’t work for DOGE but instead reports directly to Trump, a move that would shield him from some transparency laws.

Itemized list

After criticisms from Democrats, federal unions and others about the lack of specificity in DOGE’s actions, the entity’s website has recently begun providing more detail, including an itemized list of about 700 canceled contracts with estimated savings as of Tuesday. An additional nearly $145 million in real estate-related savings were also listed. 

The most expensive contract that DOGE claims to have slashed is $8 billion to D&G Support Services, LLC to provide services for the Office of Diversity and Civil Rights within U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, starting in late 2022.

Except the math doesn’t support an $8 billion contract value. In recent years, ICE’s entire annual budget hovered around $9 billion. The agency’s largest awarded contracts of the past three fiscal years, according to usaspending.gov, were $800 million for charter flight services and $787 million for transporting unaccompanied children and families.

A search of the Federal Procurement Data System for the contract ID number included on the DOGE website — 70CMSD22A00000008 — returns several documents. The original contract filing from September 2022 does, in fact, list $8 billion as the total contract value. Yet an update on Jan. 28 adjusted the total contract value to $8 million — the same day the DOGE site uploaded the contract as an $8 billion saving.

Two more filings show up, on Jan. 29 and Jan. 30, indicating first the partial and then full termination of the contract. Both of those show the $8 million total contract value. D&G did not immediately respond to a phone call and email requesting comment after business hours.

D&G Support Services, based in a suburb near Washington, describes itself as a “people-focused company” with fewer than 200 employees on LinkedIn. Its largest government contracts, according to usaspending.gov, were $16 million from the Air Force for staffing support and about $11 million from the U.S. Coast Guard. Its average contract since early 2017 is valued at roughly $1 million.

‘Very good start’

On Tuesday, a federal judge denied a request to temporarily bar DOGE teams from accessing internal government systems and removing employees from U.S. agencies, handing Trump a win on one of his signature initiatives.

The ruling rejected a bid for immediate court intervention from Democratic state attorneys general who contend Musk is exercising power to reshape the U.S. government that is supposed to be reserved only for high-level, Senate-confirmed officials.

The Trump administration has praised Musk’s effort, and indicated far more is on the way.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent echoed claims that DOGE had found an estimated $50 billion savings so far, in an interview with Fox News Tuesday, and called it a “very good start.” 

Trump, in a joint appearance alongside Musk with Fox News host Sean Hannity that aired Tuesday, said Musk’s effort is “finding billions — and it will be hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of fraud.” Musk, meanwhile, reiterated his overall goal to reduce the deficit by $1 trillion.

Yet it’s unclear how DOGE would get to those sums even with deep cuts, especially as Trump has pledged it won’t touch Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid programs. 

U.S. discretionary spending totals about $1.8 trillion annually, nearly half of which is military spending. DOGE is set to start looking at the Defense Department among its next targets for review.

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IAASB tweaks standards on working with outside experts

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The International Auditing and Assurance Standards Board is proposing to tailor some of its standards to align with recent additions to the International Ethics Standards Board for Accountants’ International Code of Ethics for Professional Accountants when it comes to using the work of an external expert.

The proposed narrow-scope amendments involve minor changes to several IAASB standards:

  • ISA 620, Using the Work of an Auditor’s Expert;
  • ISRE 2400 (Revised), Engagements to Review Historical Financial Statements;
  • ISAE 3000 (Revised), Assurance Engagements Other than Audits or Reviews of Historical Financial Information;
  • ISRS 4400 (Revised), Agreed-upon Procedures Engagements.

The IAASB is asking for comments via a digital response template that can be found on the IAASB website by July 24, 2025.

In December 2023, the IESBA approved an exposure draft for proposed revisions to the IESBA’s Code of Ethics related to using the work of an external expert. The proposals included three new sections to the Code of Ethics, including provisions for professional accountants in public practice; professional accountants in business and sustainability assurance practitioners. The IESBA approved the provisions on using the work of an external expert at its December 2024 meeting, establishing an ethical framework to guide accountants and sustainability assurance practitioners in evaluating whether an external expert has the necessary competence, capabilities and objectivity to use their work, as well as provisions on applying the Ethics Code’s conceptual framework when using the work of an outside expert.  

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Tariffs will hit low-income Americans harder than richest, report says

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President Donald Trump’s tariffs would effectively cause a tax increase for low-income families that is more than three times higher than what wealthier Americans would pay, according to an analysis from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.

The report from the progressive think tank outlined the outcomes for Americans of all backgrounds if the tariffs currently in effect remain in place next year. Those making $28,600 or less would have to spend 6.2% more of their income due to higher prices, while the richest Americans with income of at least $914,900 are expected to spend 1.7% more. Middle-income families making between $55,100 and $94,100 would pay 5% more of their earnings. 

Trump has imposed the steepest U.S. duties in more than a century, including a 145% tariff on many products from China, a 25% rate on most imports from Canada and Mexico, duties on some sectors such as steel and aluminum and a baseline 10% tariff on the rest of the country’s trading partners. He suspended higher, customized tariffs on most countries for 90 days.

Economists have warned that costs from tariff increases would ultimately be passed on to U.S. consumers. And while prices will rise for everyone, lower-income families are expected to lose a larger portion of their budgets because they tend to spend more of their earnings on goods, including food and other necessities, compared to wealthier individuals.

Food prices could rise by 2.6% in the short run due to tariffs, according to an estimate from the Yale Budget Lab. Among all goods impacted, consumers are expected to face the steepest price hikes for clothing at 64%, the report showed. 

The Yale Budget Lab projected that the tariffs would result in a loss of $4,700 a year on average for American households.

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At Schellman, AI reshapes a firm’s staffing needs

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Artificial intelligence is just getting started in the accounting world, but it is already helping firms like technology specialist Schellman do more things with fewer people, allowing the firm to scale back hiring and reduce headcount in certain areas through natural attrition. 

Schellman CEO Avani Desai said there have definitely been some shifts in headcount at the Top 100 Firm, though she stressed it was nothing dramatic, as it mostly reflects natural attrition combined with being more selective with hiring. She said the firm has already made an internal decision to not reduce headcount in force, as that just indicates they didn’t hire properly the first time. 

“It hasn’t been about reducing roles but evolving how we do work, so there wasn’t one specific date where we ‘started’ the reduction. It’s been more case by case. We’ve held back on refilling certain roles when we saw opportunities to streamline, especially with the use of new technologies like AI,” she said. 

One area where the firm has found such opportunities has been in the testing of certain cybersecurity controls, particularly within the SOC framework. The firm examined all the controls it tests on the service side and asked which ones require human judgment or deep expertise. The answer was a lot of them. But for the ones that don’t, AI algorithms have been able to significantly lighten the load. 

“[If] we don’t refill a role, it’s because the need actually has changed, or the process has improved so significantly [that] the workload is lighter or shared across the smarter system. So that’s what’s happening,” said Desai. 

Outside of client services like SOC control testing and reporting, the firm has found efficiencies in administrative functions as well as certain internal operational processes. On the latter point, Desai noted that Schellman’s engineers, including the chief information officer, have been using AI to help develop code, which means they’re not relying as much on outside expertise on the internal service delivery side of things. There are still people in the development process, but their roles are changing: They’re writing less code, and doing more reviewing of code before it gets pushed into production, saving time and creating efficiencies. 

“The best way for me to say this is, to us, this has been intentional. We paused hiring in a few areas where we saw overlaps, where technology was really working,” said Desai.

However, even in an age awash with AI, Schellman acknowledges there are certain jobs that need a human, at least for now. For example, the firm does assessments for the FedRAMP program, which is needed for cloud service providers to contract with certain government agencies. These assessments, even in the most stable of times, can be long and complex engagements, to say nothing of the less predictable nature of the current government. As such, it does not make as much sense to reduce human staff in this area. 

“The way it is right now for us to do FedRAMP engagements, it’s a very manual process. There’s a lot of back and forth between us and a third party, the government, and we don’t see a lot of overall application or technology help… We’re in the federal space and you can imagine, [with] what’s going on right now, there’s a big changing market condition for clients and their pricing pressure,” said Desai. 

As Schellman reduces staff levels in some places, it is increasing them in others. Desai said the firm is actively hiring in certain areas. In particular, it’s adding staff in technical cybersecurity (e.g., penetration testers), the aforementioned FedRAMP engagements, AI assessment (in line with recently becoming an ISO 42001 certification body) and in some client-facing roles like marketing and sales. 

“So, to me, this isn’t about doing more with less … It’s about doing more of the right things with the right people,” said Desai. 

While these moves have resulted in savings, she said that was never really the point, so whatever the firm has saved from staffing efficiencies it has reinvested in its tech stack to build its service line further. When asked for an example, she said the firm would like to focus more on penetration testing by building a SaaS tool for it. While Schellman has a proof of concept developed, she noted it would take a lot of money and time to deploy a full solution — both of which the firm now has more of because of its efficiency moves. 

“What is the ‘why’ behind these decisions? The ‘why’ for us isn’t what I think you traditionally see, which is ‘We need to get profitability high. We need to have less people do more things.’ That’s not what it is like,” said Desai. “I want to be able to focus on quality. And the only way I think I can focus on quality is if my people are not focusing on things that don’t matter … I feel like I’m in a much better place because the smart people that I’ve hired are working on the riskiest and most complicated things.”

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