A few weeks earlier, Elon Musk had announced the idea of DOGE checks, which would provide $5,000 dividend payments to Americans from the Elon Musk-headed Department of Government Efficiency. Regarding these checks, Donald Trump had said, “We’re considering giving 20% of the DOGE savings to American citizens and 20% to paying down the debt.”
The idea behind DOGE checks is that some amount of the taxpayers’ money would go back to them via these checks as DOGE would be able to generate sufficient savings. However, for this idea to materialize, DOGE would need to successfully reach its massive $2 trillion savings goal, something which does not seem to be happening right now.
Moreover, these checks are not for every American citizen and the people belonging to the lower income slabs are likely to miss out on these checks. The idea of these checks was initially pitched by James Fishback, CEO of the investment firm, Azoria, saying DOGE checks would be “a tax refund check sent to every taxpayer, funded exclusively with a portion of the total savings delivered by DOGE.”
Fishback however, also mentioned that only households that pay a certain amount of money as tax are eligible for these checks. These people, who are “net-income taxpayers” as they pay more in taxes than they get back, will be the recipients of the DOGE checks if/when they start coming in. This naturally means that lower income American households do not stand a chance of receiving these checks.
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
Fishback also mentioned, “A lot of low-income households essentially saw transfer payments of 25 to 30% of their annual income. This exclusively goes to households that are net-payers of federal income tax, and what that means is that they have a lower propensity to spend and a higher propensity to save a transfer payment like the DOGE dividend.”
However, even those Americans who spend a lot on tax will have to wait for a long time for the DOGE checks to get materialized into reality. Besides reaching the $2 trillion savings goal, the checks also need to be approved by the Congress before they can be mailed.
Musk’s DOGE has said that by rampantly downsizing the federal departments, they have already acquired $100 billion as savings and thus ideas of those checks are still in progress. While in theory it might sound fine, the reality seems to be different.
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Talking about these checks, Judge Glock, director of research at the Manhattan Institute, told Scripps News, “It would increase the deficit, it would increase immediate consumer spending, and that would have inflationary consequences, which is something we don’t want right now.”
Another expert, Jay Zagorsky, a professor at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business, told CBS that the biggest problem with these stimulus checks is inflation. He further added, “If DOGE starts mailing out large checks to large numbers of people, wow, that’s going to put a big boost to inflation because Trump’s putting out tariffs, and tariffs mean more expensive goods and services.”
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Elaine Kamarck, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution told The Associated Press that it won’t be possible for DOGE to achieve the amount of savings that is needed to send out these checks, which might result in inflation. She also mentioned that this whole idea is quite “ridiculous”, adding, “There’s no money there, and certainly not enough money to make a big contribution to taxpayers.” About Musk, she added, “The guy just says things.”
The insights of the experts do not make the idea of DOGE checks look very hopeful and even in case it works it seems that it will do more harm than good. It now remains a matter of time to see where the idea of these checks go and if they ever materialize.
