Will Americans ever see the US$5,000 ‘dividend’ Trump promised voters if Republicans keep control of Senate, House?
- President Donald Trump pledged to give every American adult $5,000 if Republicans retain control of both the House and Senate in the upcoming midterm elections, raising questions about the legality, funding, and feasibility of such payments.
- Federal law prohibits payments in exchange for votes and requires congressional authorization for spending, which Trump disputed would be necessary, despite constitutional constraints and past unfulfilled similar promises.
- The total cost of paying $5,000 to every U.S. adult would exceed $1.27 trillion, considerably higher than past stimulus efforts, and economists warn that injecting this amount into the economy could worsen inflation amid already high consumer price increases.
- Democrats strongly condemned the proposal as a reckless political bribe and fiscally irresponsible, highlighting the massive impact it would have on the national debt and criticizing Trump’s previous economic policies and governance.
U.S. President Donald Trump has promised US$5,000 to every American adult if Republicans retain control of the House of Representatives and the Senate in November’s midterm elections.
The pledge has raised questions about its legality, its cost and where the money would come from.
Federal law prohibits offering payments in exchange for votes and separately restricts promises of federally funded benefits in return for political support.
Trump’s offer would appear to skirt these prohibitions because it is more in the nature of a campaign promise and would apply to all adult Americans regardless of how they voted.
Any such payment would in any case require congressional authorization, as the U.S. Constitution bars the president from spending Treasury funds without an appropriation made by law.
But Trump told CBS News Texas he did not think Congress would need to approve the payments, without going into details.
Trump has made similar pledges in the past which never came about, including promising Americans US$2,000 checks from tariff revenues and US$5,000 checks from savings made from drastic federal job cuts.
There are about 276.8 million adults aged 18 and over in the United States, according to Congressional Budget Office data, and doling out US$5,000 to each would come to US$1.384 trillion.
Trump said he was targeting “every American.” Restricting the payments to U.S. citizens would reduce that figure to about US$1.27 trillion.
During the COVID pandemic, Congress approved payouts to income-eligible tax filers and their dependents only, a narrower approach that would lower the cost further.
The three rounds of pandemic stimulus checks approved in 2020 and 2021 came to about US$814 billion in total, according to federal oversight data.
Almost certainly. This is a serious problem for Trump as he faces voter anger over costs of living.
Direct cash handouts of this kind are sometimes described by economists as “helicopter money” — a term for no-strings-attached payouts from a central bank, meant to jolt an economy out of deflation, the opposite of the price pressures the United States faces now.
U.S. consumer inflation is running at 3.4 per cent, well above the central bank’s two per cent long-term target. Injecting roughly US$1.27 trillion into consumer hands would stir demand in an economy where prices are already rising, partly because of the energy shock from the Iran war.
Research published by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis estimated that pandemic-era fiscal stimulus, which also included support for businesses, added about 2.6 percentage points to U.S. inflation.
Not anytime soon. The government collected a record US$195 billion in customs duties in fiscal 2025, meaning a US$1.4 trillion payout would consume roughly seven years of revenues from Trump’s trade policies.
Moreover, the Supreme Court struck down many of Trump’s tariffs in February, forcing the U.S. Treasury to refund importers with interest, and net customs revenue turned negative in May through July.
The Tax Foundation, a right-leaning think tank, estimates that spending over US$1 trillion on a new one-time payment program “would balloon the deficit to nearly US$3 trillion,” even with revenue from Trump’s remaining tariffs.
Democratic reaction to Trump’s proposal was withering.
California Governor Gavin Newsom, a potential 2028 Democratic presidential candidate, condemned the pledge as coming from “the most corrupt man ever to occupy the Oval Office.”
“After making you sicker and poorer with his war, Donald Trump now wants to buy your vote with US$5,000 in taxpayer-funded blood money,” Newsom said on X.
Representative Jamie Raskin, a Democrat from Maryland, said Trump’s pledge was just the latest move in a “fantastically reckless and dysfunctional presidency.”
“So after adding trillions of dollars to the national debt, driving it over an unprecedented US$40 trillion, Trump now offers everyone a US$5,000 political bribe (“the Trump Dividend”) if we elect Republicans to run Congress,” Raskin said.