Tariff Checks: Will Trump Actually Send You a $2,000 'Dividend'?

In a series of social media posts this week, President Donald Trump pledged to send $2,000 tariff checks to taxpayers under a certain income level. This isn't the first time Americans have heard about possible stimulus checks in 2025, and previous proposals for direct payments did not lead to any money in consumers' pockets.

This time around may be no different.

As the Supreme Court weighs the legal challenge to the administration's tariffs, Trump took to Truth Social Sunday to attack critics of his trade policy, calling them "fools." In the post, the president went on to propose $2,000 payments that would be funded with money the government is taking in from tariffs.

"A dividend of at least $2000 a person (not including high income people!) will be paid to everyone," Trump wrote. On Monday, he added in another post that "all money left over from the $2000 payments... will be used to SUBSTANTIALLY PAY DOWN NATIONAL DEBT."

The president's remarks sparked excitement and questions — especially about the timeline for these payments, given that prices are rising and many consumers are tightening their budgets ahead of the holidays. But details about Trump's vision, including the income cutoffs, for tariff checks are scarce.

What we do know, however, is there are some key obstacles to Americans actually getting these $2,000 dividend payments.

First, the president can't send tariff checks without Congress's approval.

"The collection of customs duties that is resulting from these tariffs is essentially a federal collection, and the decision to increase spending or change or reduce spending or increase taxes or reduce taxes lies with Congress, not with the administration," EY-Parthenon Chief Economist Gregory Daco tells Money.

Noting how hard it's been for Congress to fund the government and pass a budget, Daco questioned whether a big spending bill to send out tariff checks would make it very far.

"I would doubt that, in the absence of a notable contraction in economic activity, there would be appetite to pass any form of stimulus," Daco says.

The GOP has thin margins in Congress, meaning Trump would need to somehow sway lawmakers in his own party who are highly concerned about deficits and debt. When Trump and Tesla CEO Elon Musk floated $5,000 "DOGE dividend" checks earlier in the year, several high-profile legislators — including House Speaker Mike Johnson — came out against them. That doesn't bode well for the tariff check proposal.

In July, when Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., introduced a bill that would create tariff rebates of at least $600 per person, the legislation didn't gain steam immediately. The bill was assigned to the Senate Finance Committee, where it hasn't moved since.

Economists also say that tariff revenue wouldn't cover the cost of sending $2,000 to all low- and middle-income taxpayers. A tariff check in the ballpark of what Hawley proposed may actually be more realistic economically than the $2,000 amount Trump suggested.

According to the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, $2,000 checks could cost about $600 billion if they followed the same framework as the COVID-era stimulus checks.

So far in 2025, the U.S. has collected an additional $142 billion from tariffs, Daco notes.

"If you annualize the tariff-induced customs duties collection, you get somewhere around $300 to $350 billion, so even if you were to look at a one-for-one annual estimate of the checks and annual estimate of the tariffs collected through 2026, you would only finance about half of that," he says.

In other words, tariff checks would increase the deficit and the national debt — and ultimately lead to upward pressure on long-term interest rates, he says.

On Monday, Johnson acknowledged in a Fox Business interview that "there's some merit to" the tariff dividend idea. But he then went on to cast doubt on whether it's the right use of tariff dollars.

"If you have trillions of dollars in new revenue, what's the best use for it? Should you pay down the debt? Because that saves families a lot of money in the long run and puts us back on sound fiscal trajectory," Johnson said. "So there'll be some intense fellowship over that, as we say in the deep South ... about what to do with this revenue."

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