‘While the billionaires laugh’: Donald Trump supporters really think Elon Musk is going to give them all $5K
Recently, many Donald Trump supporters rejoiced over Elon Musk’s claim that he’s considering giving all American taxpayers $5,000 to be funded by government savings from DOGE, which don’t exist yet.
Musk was appointed the head of DOGE, an unofficial government department, by Trump and tasked with cutting government waste and reducing the federal deficit. Initially, he claimed he would reduce the deficit by $2 trillion before walking back his claim to $1 trillion. Once Trump entered office, he quickly began making cuts and attempting to dismantle departments, including USAID. However, the problem is he has no government experience and doesn’t know what departments and staff are necessary, so he’s mindlessly making cuts. Reports quickly surfaced of DOGE “accidentally” firing hundreds of National Nuclear Security Administration workers who manage the nation’s nuclear weapons and U.S. Department of Agriculture workers who were working on the government’s response to the bird flu outbreak. While these agencies scrambled to reverse the terminations, thousands more workers from the Forest Service to the Federal Aviation Administration were terminated with seemingly little consideration of performance and necessity.
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These cuts have the potential to make Americans less safe and reduce government functions. Meanwhile, Musk doesn’t have much to show for it. He has claimed over $55 billion in DOGE savings but has been unable to prove them. Yet, he’s already teasing Trump supporters with the idea of a $5,000 check for all taxpayers.
Did Musk promise $5,000 to taxpayers?
So far, Musk hasn’t committed to anything regarding payments to taxpayers. In fact, it wasn’t even his idea. Investor James Fishback proposed that Musk and Trump issue a “DOGE Dividend,” which is basically a tax refund for Americans “funded exclusively with a portion of the total savings delivered by DOGE.” In response, Musk wrote, “Will check with the President.”
Musk’s response was very noncommittal. Of course, it didn’t take long for Trump supporters to prematurely celebrate the potential DOGE dividends. They presented it as “breaking news” that Americans were going to get back money supposedly “stolen from us by corrupt organizations like USAID.” Others questioned how Democrats could ever find a way to fight them on the DOGE dividend because it was “just too good.” Users were also already floating stipulations, such as only giving the checks to Trump voters.
Not only have Musk and Trump not committed to anything, but the funds for these hypothetical DOGE dividends don’t even exist yet. Fishback estimated it would cost about $400 billion for households that pay taxes to each get a $5,000 return. He claims that $400 billion will be only 20% of DOGE’s savings. However, very little evidence now suggests that DOGE will make these savings. As mentioned above, it claims it has made $55 billion in savings but can’t prove it. $46.5 billion of its savings is from undocumented sources. Meanwhile, the sources it did document contained many errors, such as overstating the cost of one terminated contract as $8 billion instead of $8 million. NPR estimated that DOGE’s actual total savings so far is just $2 billion.
What are the chances that DOGE’s savings will jump from $2 billion to over a trillion by next year when the hypothetical dividends would go out? Additionally, Americans need to consider what’s getting cut. Brian Baez posted a TikTok pointing out the savings came from accidentally cutting NNSA and USDA workers, as well as permanently cutting the FAA workforce days after an unprecedented, tragic airplane crash. Next, Musk may target Social Security benefits, Medicaid, and Medicare. If DOGE continues on this path, combined with Trump’s impulsive action, Baez paints a dystopian America where there are plane crashes every day, families lose their benefits, bird flu becomes a pandemic, prices skyrocket, and everyone pays more taxes “while the billionaires laugh in your face because your idiot a** was happy about a potentially, possibly, perhaps $5,000 Elon Musk stimmy check.”
Needless to say, the chances of these DOGE dividends actually happening are small. Most likely, they’re just a ploy to get Americans to go along with DOGE’s unsubstantiated claims of government fraud and to justify destroying departments, cutting necessary workers, and cutting funds they don’t have a right to cut. It’s possible the reality isn’t that Americans all get $5,000 next year but that Musk dismantles the entire U.S. government in his imaginary pursuit of these dividends only to have insufficient savings to show for it and end up adding trillions to the deficit on tax breaks for billionaires.
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