The president recently touted the idea, which came to a 30-year-old investor in a dream and caught the attention of Elon Musk on X.
James Fishback said the whole idea came to him in a recent dream: Send American taxpayers dividend checks with whatever money Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency saves as it dismantles parts of the federal government.
The idea took off on Tuesday when Fishback tweeted about it and Musk responded, pledging to share the idea with Trump. The president himself promoted the specifics of Fishback’s idea from the stage at the FII Priority Summit in Miami Beach on Wednesday.
“There’s even under consideration a new concept where we give 20% of the DOGE savings to American citizens, and 20% goes to paying down debt, because the numbers are incredible, Elon,” Trump said.
But if Trump follows through with the plan as Fishback envisions it, low-income Americans may not benefit.
Fishback, CEO of the investment firm Azoria who briefly worked with former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy as DOGE was just getting off the ground, told NBC News in an interview that he awoke from that dream and, working with the lead researcher at his firm, composed a brief proposal to send millions of American households checks.
“We fleshed this thing out in about two and a half hours,” Fishback said Wednesday. “We sent it to [White House chief of staff] Susie [Wiles], sent it to some folks in the admin, sent it to some folks at Treasury, and here we are a day or so later, with it being shared with President Trump from Elon. And so it’s exciting.”
The episode illuminated the speed with which Musk can help draw the president’s attention to seemingly random ideas — even one from a little-known 30-year-old investor — that are floating around on his social media platform X.
Something like a “DOGE dividend” wouldn’t be an entirely foreign concept to Trump; it follows the playbook of a pandemic-era program from his first term. Then, the government sent direct payments to Americans with the president’s name attached.
“The president of the United States should sign the checks, and the checks should include the word DOGE, very simply, because we have to be honest,” Fishback said, adding: “If I’m the CEO of Azoria and I cut our employees a check every month, my name is on it. President Trump is the leader of the country, the duly elected president of the United States. His name should be on the checks. As should DOGE, because that is what’s responsible for these savings.”
The difference during the pandemic was that people who made below a certain amount all received the checks.
In his proposal, Fishback starts from the presumption that DOGE will achieve $2 trillion in cuts to the government. He takes 20% of those savings, or $400 billion, and divides them among 79 million taxpaying households, to receive $5,000 each. Importantly, the rebate would be sent only to households that are net-income taxpayers — people who pay more in taxes than they get back — with lower-income Americans not qualifying for the return. According to the Pew Research Center, most Americans who have an adjusted gross income of under $40,000 pay effectively no federal income tax.
Since the dividend checks would be funded by dollars that have already been appropriated rather than the deficit-financed stimulus checks, Fishback writes, they would not worsen inflation.
“The DOGE Dividend is different from past stimulus checks (e.g. 2021 American Rescue Plan) because only tax-paying households receive it,” he writes. “Tax-paying households are more likely to save (not spend) a transfer payment like the DOGE Dividend as consumption is a lower share of their income. … There is nothing inflationary about paying off debt, saving for emergencies, or investing in college or retirement. In fact, debt paydowns are actually deflationary.”
In an interview, Fishback said the dividend only going to households above a certain income threshold should ease concerns about any inflationary pressure the rebates would cause, adding that the pandemic-era checks were sent “indiscriminately.”
“A lot of low-income households essentially saw transfer payments of 25 to 30% of their annual … income,” Fishback said, adding, “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.”
Yet even among Republicans, there is no consensus for sending Americans checks with money DOGE is able to save — the total amount of which is, so far, unclear. The group claims on its website that it has saved $55 billion so far, but some claims about its work have not stood up to the most basic scrutiny. In one example, DOGE claimed to have saved $8 billion from a single canceled contract at the Department of Homeland Security. It turns out, that contract clearly stated it was for just $8 million.
