Elon Musk expressed interest in a proposal to use savings from the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to give taxpayers a “DOGE dividend” payment. X user James Fishback wrote a post that tagged Musk and outlined his plan to take 20% of the savings found by DOGE to send it back “to hard-working Americans as a tax refund check. It was their money in the first place!”
Fishback noted that if DOGE achieves its goal of cutting $2 trillion in federal spending, that would provide the 78 million taxpaying households in the U.S. with about a $5,000 refund or “DOGE dividend” per household, with the remainder used to pay down the national debt.
“Will check with the President,” Musk replied in response to Fishback’s post.
Although DOGE has set a high-end goal of $2 trillion in savings, Musk has suggested that $1 trillion in savings would be a success and explained that goal in an appearance with President Donald Trump on Fox News’ “Hannity” on Tuesday night.
“The overall goal is to try to get a trillion dollars out of the deficit,” Musk said. “If the deficit is not brought under control, America will go bankrupt.” “This is a very important thing for people to understand. A country is no different from an individual, in that if an individual overspends, an individual can go bankrupt. And so can a country,” he said. “And the massive waste, fraud and abuse that has been going on, which is leading to a $2 trillion a year deficit.”
DOGE claims an estimated $55 billion in savings achieved to date from canceling certain federal leases and contracts, asset sales, fraud deletion, regulatory savings and workforce reductions. While Musk appeared open to the idea of a DOGE dividend on Tuesday night, he said on Wednesday morning that balancing the budget should be the focus given DOGE’s efforts.
Musk wrote in a post on Wednesday that, “We need to balance the budget as first priority,” as a response to a post by Scott Adams that raised concerns the DOGE dividend could result in the government using the DOGE savings as a “piggy bank.”
The federal government ran a more than $1.8 trillion budget deficit in fiscal year 2024, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). It’s expected to grow above $2 trillion annually in the years ahead according to the CBO’s projections, leaving DOGE and the Trump administration with a significant gap to close if they intend to balance the budget.
