Elon Musk promised to send checks from all the DOGE savings. Is that for real?
President Donald Trump has said he is considering distributing “DOGE dividends” to American taxpayers, drawing from any cost savings his Department of Government Efficiency achieves through aggressive cuts to federal spending and employment.
Congress, however, is skeptical — and it’s not clear that the DOGE’s strategy will actually yield anywhere near the savings it projects.
Billionaire Elon Musk floated the idea of DOGE dividends, based on a proposal from a user on his social platform X, to Trump last week. By Wednesday, Trump said he was thinking about dedicating 20 percent of DOGE’s cost savings to Americans and another 20 percent to paying down the national debt.
Trump may see the proposal as a means of boosting his approval ratings, which have slipped since he took office: During his first term, Trump famously signed his name to the wildly popular pandemic stimulus checks sent to Americans.
But even Republican lawmakers are at this point hesitant to support the proposal, which would have to be approved by Congress as part of ongoing budget negotiations.
Some have suggested they would consider it. Business Insider reported Friday that Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) wanted to see details before committing, and Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) said he would prefer seeing DOGE savings redistributed via the child tax credit instead.
Other Republicans, however, have been openly critical of the idea, suggesting that paying down the national debt ought to be their priority over sending checks to Americans. They include House Speaker Mike Johnson, North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis, and Rep. Eric Burlison of Missouri.
“If you think about our core principles, right, fiscal responsibility is what we do as conservatives. That’s our brand,” Johnson said Thursday at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). “And 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?”
Trump can’t afford many Republican defections given their narrow majorities in the House and Senate. That makes it unlikely that DOGE dividends will pass, even if DOGE were to save enough money to make them possible.
Are DOGE’s cost-cutting goals even achievable?
The original dividend proposal assumes DOGE will ultimately achieve $2 trillion in savings and that 20 percent of those savings would be passed on to American taxpayers, resulting in a $5,000 tax rebate for each household. Finding $2 trillion to trim, however, would be difficult if not impossible.
As of Monday, DOGE claimed to have achieved $55 billion in savings, citing a so-called wall of receipts. However, news organizations including CBS, the New York Times, and Politico have pointed out major accounting errors in the DOGE’s calculations that caused it to overstate those savings by billions of dollars.
To keep its cost-cutting promises, DOGE would almost certainly have to slash Social Security, Medicare, and the defense budget — and find some way to cut interest payments on the national debt. Spending in those categories accounted for more than $4.8 trillion of the $6.9 trillion federal budget for fiscal year 2024.
Trump previously promised not to touch Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, but he has since endorsed a Republican budget plan that includes deep cuts to Medicaid. It’s not clear if he would consider additional cuts to other major entitlement programs to achieve the cost savings goals set by Musk and his team.