Don’t expect a $5,000 check from DOGE

• An investment banker floated paying some of DOGE’s savings back to taxpayers in the form of checks.
• Elon Musk said he’d “check with” Trump about it.
• Lawmakers on Capitol Hill would need to approve it, and it’s facing some skepticism.

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 investment manager James Fishback, gained significant traction online on Tuesday after Musk said on X that he would “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.

“I literally had a dream about this,” Fishback told BI 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 two and a half hours.”

Fishback told BI that he’s meeting with a variety of House and Senate offices in Washington, DC this week, and that he’s emailed the proposal to White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles. It’s still unclear whether Trump has been briefed on the idea — Fishback said Wiles hadn’t responded as of Wednesday afternoon — and the White House did not respond to a request for comment.

In any event, the idea 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 BI that he believes “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 eight 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 BI. “Not only from a standpoint of not having to pay taxes, but so we don’t inflate them away.”

Fishback said he welcomes the conversation and agrees that paying down the debt should be a top priority. But he said that 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 potential 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 only be sent to net payers of federal income tax, which Fishback estimates to be 79 million households.

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

“That’s what I prefer to do,” Hawley told BI, 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 is “not an economic stimulus package” and is about paying “restitution” to taxpayers whose money has 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 BI, referring to DOGE broadly. “This is all a pretty simple effort to steal from regular people to enrich the very wealthy.”