President Trump has vowed to send $2,000 tariff “dividend” checks to most Americans by the 2026 midterms – but some Republicans are questioning how the president will get the funds for the payouts.
Trump has promised to send the so-called “dividend” checks to low- and middle-income Americans using revenue from his sweeping expanse of tariffs.
How much will the checks cost?
Dishing out $2,000 to most Americans would cost as much as $600 billion – twice the revenue expected from tariffs, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.
The steep tariffs Trump imposed in April – with a 10% baseline rate on all foreign countries – had raised $90 billion as of Sept. 30, according to data from US Customs and Border Patrol. He recently lifted tariffs for over 200 products as part of his push to make the cost of living more affordable.
That leaves a substantial gap in funding the checks, though Trump has promised not to pay for them with taxpayer dollars.
Trump says tariff revenues will increase
In a Truth Social post on Monday, Trump said tariff revenues will soon “skyrocket” – which could help pay for the checks.
Businesses rushed to stockpile inventory earlier this year ahead of the tariff deadlines so they could avoid paying the new import levies. But soon, warehouses will start to run out of this backstock, and companies will be forced to cough up the import fees in full, the president predicted.
Americans have thus not yet felt “the full benefit of the Tariffs,” he added.
How would the tariff ‘dividends’ be different from the COVID stimulus checks?
The $2,000 tariff checks would not be the first such payments sent out by Trump.
In March 2020, he signed off on congressionally-approved COVID stimulus checks.
Democrats campaigned on bringing more stimulus payments to Americans, with then-President Joe Biden doing so in 2021. Many economists blame those checks for helping to spike inflation, which ultimately tanked Biden’s approval ratings.
Republican lawmakers have raised concerns that Trump’s tariff dividends could have a similar effect on inflation, which is already heating up – hitting 3% in September, its fastest rate since January, according to the Consumer Price Index.
In an attempt to curb inflationary effects, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has urged Americans to save the checks instead of spending them.
“Maybe we could persuade Americans to save that, because one of the things that’s going to happen next year is the Trump account[s]” designed to store savings for kids, he told Fox News last week.
Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill” is creating a new class of investment accounts for children born between 2025 and 2028 that will be seeded with $1,000 from the US Treasury.
About 40% of Trump’s 2020 stimulus payments were spent, while 30% were used to pay down debt and 30% were saved, according to a National Bureau of Economic Research study.
Later stimulus payments were also mostly spent or used to pay down debt, according to the New York Fed.
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