Don’t expect a $5,000 check from DOGE

Elon Musk said on Tuesday that he’d “check with” President Donald Trump about the idea.

What if some of the money saved by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency could be paid back to Americans as checks from the government?

That idea, promoted by the investment manager James Fishback, gained significant traction online on Tuesday after Musk said on X that he’d “check with” President Donald Trump about it. “Obviously, the President is the Commander-in-Chief, so this is entirely up to him,” Musk later added.

After the initial publication of this story, Trump acknowledged the idea at an event in Florida, saying a “new concept where we give 20% of the DOGE savings to American citizens” was “under consideration.”

PRESIDENT TRUMP: “There’s even under consideration a new concept where we give 20% of the @DOGE savings to American citizens.” pic.twitter.com/fV8cXCtUQ9

— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) February 19, 2025

“I literally had a dream about this,” Fishback told B-17 during a Wednesday phone interview about how he and a colleague at his firm came up with the idea. “Then we woke up and started working on it, and put it on paper over the course of about 2 ½ hours.”

Fishback said that he was meeting with a variety of House and Senate offices in Washington, DC, this week and that he’d emailed the proposal to the White House chief of staff, Susie Wiles. The White House didn’t respond to a request for comment.

In any event, the idea still has a long way to go. It would take an act of Congress to enact the proposal, which is already encountering some early skepticism from lawmakers in both parties.

Republican Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina told B-17 that he believed “sending checks is not the smartest way to spend savings” and that he’d rather use the savings to “drive down the debt.”

“I have three grandchildren, all under the age of 8 years old,” Tillis said. “Their fractional share of the national debt is about $100,000. I think maybe it makes sense to help pay down that debt obligation.”

Responding to the proposal on X, Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin wrote that he’d be “happy” to entertain the idea “once we balance the budget.”

“The first use of that money needs to actually be reducing spending, so we can have a balanced budget, so Americans can keep their hard-earned dollars,” Johnson told B-17. “Not only from a standpoint of not having to pay taxes, but so we don’t inflate them away.”

Fishback said he welcomed the conversation and agreed that paying down the debt should be a top priority. But he said the checks would be a crucial way to generate public interest and buy-in to DOGE’s goals — and he suggested that public pressure could push critics to back his populist proposal.

“I don’t see how you can go to a town hall meeting, when you go back to your district, and say you voted against President Trump’s DOGE Dividend,” Fishback said. “You’re going to have a lot of questions to answer from a lot of angry, aggrieved taxpayers.”

How the ‘DOGE Dividend’ would work

Under the rosiest version of Fishback’s proposal, some Americans would receive a one-time $5,000 check in 2026, paid for the savings generated by DOGE.

There are a couple of caveats.

For one, Fishback’s plan is based on an assumption of $2 trillion in savings, the goal that was originally set for DOGE. Musk and Trump have since halved that number, telling Sean Hannity in a Tuesday night interview on Fox News that “the overall goal is to try to get a trillion dollars out of the deficit.”

Additionally, the checks — funded by 20% of DOGE’s overall savings — would be sent only to net payers of federal income tax, which Fishback estimates to be 79 million households.

President Trump and @ElonMusk should announce a ‘DOGE Dividend’—a tax refund check sent to every taxpayer, funded exclusively with a portion of the total savings delivered by DOGE. pic.twitter.com/p5AZZj3Ttc

— James Fishback (@j_fishback) February 18, 2025

Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri, who said he generally supported “the principle of taking that money and returning it to the people,” said he wanted to see those savings put toward a child tax credit.

“That’s what I prefer to do,” Hawley told B-17, pointing to the costs borne by families with multiple children. “We ought to direct relief to them, and this would be a great way to fund it.”

Fishback countered that his proposal was “not an economic stimulus package” and was about paying “restitution” to taxpayers whose money had been misused.

“The only criterion that we care about is whether or not you have paid federal income tax. If you have, then you deserve restitution. If you haven’t, then you haven’t been aggrieved,” Fishback said. “The people who get restitution are the people who paid, and did not feel like they got a good value out of it.”

Meanwhile, Democrats largely want nothing to do with DOGE, owing to the recent shuttering of federal agencies and mass firing of federal employees.

“It’s just a con. It’s not about saving money. It’s about stealing from people,” Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut told B-17, referring to DOGE broadly. “This is all a pretty simple effort to steal from regular people to enrich the very wealthy.”

This story has been updated to reflect President Donald Trump’s acknowledgment of the idea later on Wednesday.