Mike Johnson Pours Cold Water on Trump’s DOGE Refund Idea

Speaker Mike Johnson pushed back Thursday against an idea floated by President Donald Trump to reward U.S. taxpayers with DOGE stimulus checks.

The time isn’t right, the speaker argued, to send savings from Elon Musk’s cost-cutting efforts back to Americans in the form of dividend checks.

“I mean, politically, that would be great for us,” Johnson said in a speech to the annual Conservative Political Action Conference on Thursday.

He said the president certainly “got everybody’s attention” but that “if you think about our core principles, right, fiscal responsibility is what we do as conservatives.” Instead, he said, the savings from Musk’s slashing of government programs and firings of federal workers should be used to pay down the national debt.

The speaker’s comments came after Trump on Wednesday floated the idea of turning 20% of the savings amassed by Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency task force into checks for taxpayers.

“We’re thinking about giving 20% back to the American citizens and 20% back to pay down debt,” the president said.

But Johnson said it wouldn’t be a fiscally responsible approach for Republicans to take at this time.

“That’s our brand, and we have a $36 trillion federal debt,” he said. “We have a giant deficit that we’re contending with—I think we need to pay down the credit card right?”

Musk recently said on his social media platform X he “would check” with the president about the potential payouts in response to Azoria investment firm CEO James Fishback’s post calling for a “$5,000 ‘DOGE Dividend’ check per tax-paying household.”

White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller told reporters on Thursday that Congress will have to work through its budget reconciliation process—which allows Congress to pass a slew of Trump’s top priorities along party lines—before it considers the prospect of $5,000 checks.

“Well, the way that it works is when you achieve savings, you can either return it to the taxpayers, you can return it to our debtors, or it can be cycled into next year’s budget,” Miller replied.

“So in other words, you can just transfer it into the next fiscal window and then lower the overall spending level,” he added.