Trump weighing DOGE dividend to send taxpayers checks with saved funds heres how much Americans could get

President Trump said Wednesday that he’s considering returning 20% of the savings from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency initiative directly to taxpayers — potentially putting thousands of dollars in the pockets of Americans struggling under record inflation.“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,” Trump said in a Miami Beach speech to a nonprofit funded by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund.“The numbers are incredible, Elon, so many billions — hundreds of billions — and we’re thinking about giving 20% back to the American citizens.”Trump floated the potential refund after Musk tweeted Tuesday that he would “check with the President,” in response to a post from investor James Fishback, who has been advocating the concept.It’s unclear precisely how much DOGE has saved to date, but Musk has stated a goal of $1 trillion in annual cost cuts as his 100-person team blazes through the federal bureaucracy, effectively closing some agencies, mass-firing employees at others and canceling contracts deemed wasteful.Musk’s initiative has halted operations at the $50 billion-a-year USAID foreign aid agency and started the process of dismissing most of its 10,000 employees while beginning to dismantle the 1,700-person Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which has $712 million in funds whose fate is in limbo.On Friday, DOGE said that it discovered $1.9 billion in “misplaced” and unneeded Department of Housing and Urban Development funds and canceled $373 million in Education Department grants for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) training sessions.Also last week, the initiative scrapped $900 million in Education Department grants for tracking academic progress — and put the Pentagon’s vast discretionary spending in the crosshairs.Musk, the CEO of SpaceX and Tesla and owner of X, says he plans to lead the fiscal o...