(NewsNation) — President Donald Trump wants to take some of the savings that come from Elon Musk’s government efficiency push and return it directly to taxpayers, but that doesn’t mean you should expect a check in the mail anytime soon.
Trump recently endorsed the idea — which started on social media — of sending 20% of the Department of Government Efficiency’s savings back to taxpayers as a “DOGE dividend.”
“I love it. A 20% dividend, so to speak, for the money that we’re saving by going after the waste and fraud and abuse and all of the other things that are happening,” Trump told reporters last week.
When asked how much money it could be, Trump said, “It could be a lot. If it’s 20%, we’d give back a lot of money to the taxpayer.”
‘DOGE dividend’ advisor says $5k checks are ‘reasonable’
Musk also supports the idea, likening so-called “DOGE dividend checks” to the “spoils of battle” in a recent interview.
But that doesn’t mean dividend checks are going to happen. Congress would have to authorize the plan, and so far, even Republican lawmakers have been hesitant to embrace it.
It’s also unclear how much money DOGE can save to return to taxpayers in the first place. Clear evidence of major savings has been scant, and budget experts doubt DOGE can reach its $2 trillion savings goal on its own.
“I don’t think Americans should bet on a big DOGE dividend coming their way,” said Romina Boccia, the director of budget and entitlement policy at the libertarian Cato Institute.
Boccia added: “Politicians love to provide benefits to their constituents, but when it comes to actually curtailing spending and producing deficit reduction, that is much harder to do.”
Here’s what to know about the DOGE dividend and how likely it is to happen.
What is the ‘DOGE dividend’ check?
The idea for a “DOGE dividend” surfaced on social media last week when “anti-woke” investor James Fishback posted a four-page proposal and tagged Elon Musk.
Fishback suggested sending a “tax refund check” as a form of “restitution” that would go out to roughly “79 million tax-paying households.”
Those households would receive a $5,000 check — a 20% cut of DOGE’s $2 trillion in targeted savings, according to Fishback’s formulation.
The idea caught Musk’s attention, who said he would run it by Trump, and the president has since expressed support for the proposal.
Congress would have to approve the checks, and achieving the sort of payout that Fishback proposed would require Musk to hit his target of $2 trillion in spending cuts — a number that has drawn skepticism.
DOGE claims it has saved billions, but nearly 75% unaccounted for
“I think that 2 trillion is likely an overly ambitious target that DOGE by itself will not be able to accomplish,” Boccia said.
Achieving that level of savings, Boccia said, would require congressional buy-in and cuts to major entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare, which Trump has already taken off the table.
DOGE claims it has saved an estimated $65 billion so far, citing a combination of fraud detection, canceled contracts, workforce reductions and other alleged cost-cutting measures.
However, several analyses have cast doubt on DOGE’s numbers, identifying errors that caused savings to be vastly overstated. A New York Times report found that the single biggest line item on the DOGE website was off by about $8 billion.
“At the moment, we cannot take DOGE at face value,” Boccia said.
Fishback told NewsNation’s Chris Cuomo that his plan would help DOGE reach its $2 trillion goal because citizens would be incentivized to report wasteful spending.
“Every American can step up, report fraud and abuse to DOGE directly via X, and we’ll see the savings go up, hit $2 trillion, and we’ll see the checks dispersed next summer,” Fishback said.
Who would get DOGE dividend checks?
In his proposal, Fishback said the checks would only go to households that pay income taxes, meaning tens of millions of lower-income Americans would miss out.
An estimated 72.5 million households — roughly 40% — didn’t pay federal income tax in 2022, according to an analysis by the Tax Policy Center.
For the most part, people don’t pay income taxes because they have little income. About 60% of nonpayers make less than $30,000, and another 28% make between $30,000 and about $60,000, per the Tax Policy Center.
Is Elon Musk right about widespread Social Security fraud?
“While some politicians imply that people somehow are cheating the system by not paying taxes, the reality is quite different. People generally don’t pay federal income tax because, well, they don’t make very much money,” Howard Gleckman, a senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center, wrote in the report.
Of those who paid no federal income tax in 2022, roughly a third were age 65 or older. That means many people who are primarily living on Social Security benefits wouldn’t receive DOGE dividend checks under the current plan.
Are DOGE dividend checks a good idea?
Some experts think DOGE dividend checks would worsen inflation, like when COVID-era stimulus checks helped drive up prices.
“Love what DOGE is doing, but this is a bad idea. There’s no need to send ‘dividend checks,'” Preston Brashers, a tax policy research fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation, wrote on X.
“If the government sends out stimmy checks, inflation will come back with a vengeance,” Brashers warned.
Fishback argues that DOGE dividend checks would not be inflationary because “unlike COVID-stimulus checks which were deficit-financed,” the new round of checks would be “exclusively funded with DOGE-driven savings.”
Could Trump really return DOGE savings to taxpayers?
Kevin Hassett, director of the White House’s National Economic Council, echoed that claim, insisting that the dividend checks would not be inflationary during a press briefing last week.
“Imagine if we don’t spend government money, and we give it back to people. If they spend it all, then you’re even,” Hassett said.
Boccia said a DOGE dividend could push up inflation if the government were to borrow and fund the checks based on expected savings rather than savings that have actually materialized.
Others don’t think the checks will be sizeable enough to matter.
“I can’t imagine they’d be inflationary because I can’t imagine they’d be big enough,’’ Elaine Kamarck, senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution, told The Associated Press.
Kamarck dismissed the DOGE dividend as “ridiculous” and said there’s not enough money to cut that would result in a big contribution to taxpayers.
What do lawmakers think about the idea?
A DOGE dividend check would have to be approved by Congress, and even Trump-aligned GOP lawmakers seem skeptical.
House Speaker Mike Johnson appeared less than enthusiastic when asked about the idea at the Conservative Political Action Conference last week.
“Politically, that would be great for us, you know, you can send everybody a check,” Johnson said. “But if you think about our core principles, right, fiscal responsibility is what we do as conservatives. That’s our brand.”
Speaker Johnson discourages DOGE stimulus checks idea
Johnson added: “We have a $36 trillion federal debt. We have a giant deficit that we’re contending with. I think we need to pay down the credit card, right?”
Senator Ron Johnson, R-Wisc., said he loves what Musk is doing to expose waste, fraud and abuse but pumped the breaks on a DOGE dividend.
“I’m always happy to let the American people keep more of their hard-earned money, but DOGE savings should first go toward reducing spending so that inflation doesn’t become the silent tax robbing them of their purchasing power,” Johnson wrote on X.
Senator Ted Cruz, R-Texas, said he’d “want to see the details” of the plan, according to Business Insider.
Wyoming Senator Cynthia Lummis, a Republican, told Scripps News that eliminating the debt and curbing inflation would be her main priorities for any savings associated with DOGE.
“If there’s money left after we address inflation, and the debt, and the deficit, it’s always a good idea to send taxpayers their money back. But when we’re $36 trillion in debt, we’ve dug ourselves a pretty big hole,” Lummis said.
