President Donald Trump and Elon Musk suggest Americans could receive a dividend check, funded exclusively from the savings achieved by slashing the federal government’s spending, thanks to the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.
“I love it,” Trump said about the 20% “DOGE Dividend” aboard Air Force One Wednesday night.
“I think it’s a great idea. It could be a lot,” he told reporters on the plane. “It could also give the taxpayer incentive to go out and report things,” like waste, fraud and abuse.
He credited Musk for bringing up the $5,000 payments to taxpayers, originally posted by James Fishback, the CEO of an investment firm, Invest Azoria.
“With DOGE reportedly achieving $1 billion in savings per day, President Trump has an opportunity to work with Congress to take DOGE one step further and deliver ... a tax refund check to be sent after the expiration of DOGE in July 2026 funded exclusively with a portion of the total savings delivered by DOGE,” Fishback said.
Musk responded to the post and told Fishback he “will check with the President.”
Of course, DOGE has a long road ahead to meeting its goal of finding $1 trillion in savings, let alone $2 trillion.
DOGE’s progress
This independent department’s website indicates an estimated $55 billion in savings so far, but these figures aren’t verified.
It lists several government agencies that endured budget cuts, including U.S. Agency for International Development, Department of Education, Office of Personnel Management, Health and Human Services and the Department of Agriculture.
The latest Bloomberg report states that the DOGE website only accounted for $16.6 billion in savings. Meanwhile, some canceled contracts were taken at face value instead of subtracting the money that has already been spent.
For example, DOGE claims it canceled an $8 billion contract to D&G Support Services to help the Office of Diversity and Civil Rights within U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. But ICE’s entire annual budget is around $9 billion, creating a discrepancy, as per the report.
Critics say DOGE’s work is shrouded in secrecy, but it has also revealed instances of quid pro quo transactions within the Biden administration, according to the latest from The Washington Free Beacon.
Their reporting says the Biden administration’s Environmental Protection Agency awarded a $2 billion grant to the group Power Forward Communities, which is linked to Georgia Democratic candidate Stacey Abrams. She ran for Georgia governor in 2018 and was a surrogate for the Biden campaign in 2020 and 2024.
The nonprofit came into existence just a few months before it received the grant, and its link to Abrams leaves the door open for skepticism about the Biden administration playing favorites.
The grant, created as a part of the Inflation Reduction Act, is a part of the $20 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund set aside for climate projects taken on by eight entities, including Power Forward Communities. The money was parked at a Citibank account, restricting the Trump administration’s access to it. But Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin promised to claw back the money.
“My awesome team at EPA has found the gold bars,” Zeldin said in the video last week. “This scheme was the first of its kind in EPA history, and it was purposely designed to obligate all of the money in a rush job with reduced oversight.”
He referenced a video released by Project Veritas in December, where an EPA agent compared the Biden administration’s efforts to spend money at the end of former President Joe Biden’s term to throwing “gold bars” off the Titanic. Zeldin alleged the Biden administration knew they were wasting taxpayer dollars.
Despite making some progress in rooting out fraud and waste, DOGE has a long road ahead to meeting its goal of $1 trillion in cuts. DOGE also faces legal challenges related to data privacy and some pushback from Congress, as constituents voice their concerns over rushed, large scale layoffs in the federal government.