Elon Musk has announced that he plans to “check with the president” about the possibility of sending Americans rebates from the federal savings identified by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
James Fishback, the CEO and co-founder of Azoria, proposed on social platform X that President Donald Trump and Musk should jointly introduce a “DOGE Dividend” — a tax rebate sent to every taxpayer, funded entirely by a portion of the savings generated by DOGE.
Musk responded a little over two hours later, saying, “Will check with the President.”
In his post, Fishback included an image titled “The Case for DOGE Dividend.” He stated that DOGE aimed to achieve $2 trillion in government savings and suggested returning $400 billion to taxpayers. This would result in roughly $5,000 per household for the 78 million households that pay federal income taxes.
However, such a rebate program would require approval from Congress, and budget experts have pointed out that lawmakers may prefer to allocate those funds elsewhere, as reported by Politico.
Some Republican members of the House have proposed using the savings to reduce the national debt, while others believe the DOGE savings could be used to fund an extension of the Trump-era tax cuts.
Democrats would likely be reluctant to support a proposal that could enhance Trump’s appeal with voters.
“If [the DOGE dividend proposal] is real, you have to have a way of estimating and collecting the amounts that are being saved and putting them into some account,” said F. Stevens Redburn, a former official at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), as reported by Politico. “Both OMB [Office of Management and Budget] and CBO [Congressional Budget Office] would look at that, and then Treasury would then record those amounts.”
As of Wednesday morning, the DOGE website listed the “total estimated savings” as $55 billion.
The group claims this figure represents “a combination of fraud detection/deletion, contract/lease cancellations, contract/lease renegotiations, asset sales, grant cancellations, workforce reductions, programmatic changes, and regulatory savings.”
Following his victory in the November election, Trump appointed Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to lead DOGE, with a mandate to identify waste, fraud, and abuse in government spending. Ramaswamy has since stepped down to run for governor of Ohio.
Last week, Musk advocated for the “deletion” of entire federal agencies as part of his plan to radically cut government spending and reshape its priorities.
“I think we do need to delete entire agencies as opposed to leave a lot of them behind,” Musk said during a video call at the World Governments Summit in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. “If we don’t remove the roots of the weed, then it’s easy for the weed to grow back.”
{Matzav.com}