The challenge for Trump and Musk is to make the math match their promises.
Ben Werschkul · Washington Correspondent
In This Article:
President Donald Trump is supporting a plan known as the “DOGE dividend,” which would allow Americans to receive a tax refund the next year as a result of the savings that Elon Musk and his team are discovering.
The newest example of how the Trump administration is changing the objectives of Musk’s cost-cutting group and adding new elements to its constantly growing purpose is the possibility of distributing 20% of DOGE’s savings to American taxpayers.
Along with “the overall goal” of deficit reduction, Musk added another new aspect to DOGE’s agenda this week when he stated in a Fox News interview that “one of the biggest functions of the DOGE team is just making sure that the presidential executive orders are actually carried out.”
The difficulty is that DOGE has a long way to go before its calculations can match its claims based just on the dividend concept.
According to new data that Musk’s firm recently released this week, DOGE is still far from producing a dividend of more than a few dollars for every taxpayer, and the US government’s $2 trillion annual deficit is frightening.
Trump stated on Wednesday that “the numbers are incredible… so many billions, hundreds of billions” and that the refunds “could be a lot,” indicating that a DOGE dividend is feasible.
However, the statistics do not yet back him.
The DOGE team has started posting its work online and is reporting that it has already saved $55 billion through a variety of initiatives, including labor reductions, contract renegotiations, and fraud detection.
Only the savings from contracts and real estate actions have been thoroughly accounted for by the group. The total savings from those is approximately $8.6 billion.
The verified savings have been estimated much lower by other analyses; NPR has put the amount closer to $2 billion.
Additionally, DOGE has had to deal with internet detectives who have exposed inaccuracies in the group’s data, such as savings that were first reported three times, which the group fixed without altering the top-line figure.
The actual verified savings to date, according to Jessica Riedl, a senior scholar at the conservative Manhattan Institute, are closer to $4 billion, which she says equates to a payout of $2.42 per person.
DOGE’S BIGGEST TARGETS
For Trump, ‘I love it’
Musk retreated off his pledge that DOGE will ultimately save “at least” $2 trillion during the 2024 campaign trail, stating more recently that he has a “good shot” of reducing that amount by roughly half.
This week, he reiterated that “the overall goal is to try to get $1 trillion out of the deficit.” He has decided on $1 trillion as his target.
Even if there are still a lot of unanswered issues regarding his original assertions, Musk will need to pick up the pace in order to do that.
Although $55 billion in a single month would save taxpayers a lot of money, it would only account for less than 1% of the federal budget each year.
As the group expands to areas of the government like Social Security and Medicare, which Trump has consistently pledged not to slash, Musk’s job may also become more difficult from here.
Overall, the data released this week demonstrated that Musk’s team currently has accounts with roughly 10% of the federal government’s agencies.
According to a post this week by Riedl, “Sure, if DOGE eliminates the entire budget deficit, we can talk,” but in order to do so, DOGE would have to “eviscerate much of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, defense, and veterans.”
“At that point, a dividend check may be the last of voter concerns,” she stated.
James Fishback, the CEO of investment firm Azoria, initially proposed the dividend, outlining a strategy in which the government would set aside 20% of DOGE’s savings to distribute the funds directly to Americans the next year.
Based on Musk’s now-disregarded $2 trillion savings target, he estimated that the dividend might be distributed as a $5,000 tax return the next year.
Musk jumped on the bandwagon almost away, stating on social media that he “will check with the President” in response to Fishback’s proposal before praising the president’s adoption of it on Thursday morning.
“I love it,” Trump said when discussing the concept with reporters on Air Force One on Wednesday evening.
According to the president, “it could also give the taxpayer incentive to go out and report things.”
