Unlock the White House Watch newsletter for free
Your guide to what the 2024 US election means for Washington and the world
Elon Musk has said US President Donald Trump backs his bid to distribute savings from a government cost-cutting drive directly to citizens, setting up a potential showdown with Republican deficit hawks.
“I talked to the president and he is supportive of [the idea],” Musk, who is the de facto leader of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (Doge), told the Conservative Political Action Conference on Thursday.
“It sounds like that is something we are going to do.”
This week Musk seized on the idea of sending “Doge dividend cheques” to Americans, floated on social media by James Fishback, an investor and early adviser to the plan.
Fishback had suggested that households could receive $5,000 each if Doge achieved its aim of slashing $2tn in government spending, a goal even Musk felt might be too ambitious.
Doge, which has rampaged through government agencies, cancelling hundreds of contracts and suspending tens of thousands of federal workers, says it has already made $55bn in savings, although that number has been disputed by several independent analyses.
Trump on Wednesday said he was considering sending “20 per cent of the Doge savings to American citizens” and using a further fifth to pay down the national debt. He said the move might encourage Americans to come forward with examples of government fraud and waste.
But US House Speaker Mike Johnson — a Trump ally who was also speaking at CPAC — said the idea was contrary to Republican values.
“Politically that would be great for us, you send everybody a cheque,” Johnson said. “But if you think about our core principles, fiscal responsibility is what we do as conservatives, that is our brand . . . and we have a $36tn federal debt, we have a giant deficit.
“I think we need to pay down the credit card, right?” Johnson added.
In an interview on CNBC, Florida’s chief financial officer Jimmy Patronis, a staunch Trump ally who is running for US Congress, also opposed Doge dividend distributions. “If it’s a $5,000 cheque, I’ve got some heartburn,” he said.
Republicans have long blamed the Biden administration’s $1.9tn Covid-era stimulus cheques for stoking inflation and ran television ads with the claim ahead of last November’s presidential election.
But at a White House briefing on Thursday, Kevin Hassett, Trump’s National Economic Council director, played down the prospect of Doge dividend cheques having a similar effect.
“If we don’t spend government money and we give it back to people, then if they spend it all, you’re even,” Hassett said. “But they’re probably going to save a lot of it, in which case you’re reducing inflation.”
Musk seemed to relish the political salience of such cheques.
“It is money that is taken away from things that are destructive to the country and from organisations that hate you, to you,” he told the CPAC crowd. “That’s awesome . . . that is the spoils of battle.”
Read the full article here
