WASHINGTON – Republicans on Capitol Hill don’t love President Donald Trump’s proposal to send out $2,000 checks to American households next year.
Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) called it a “crazy idea,” since even with new tariff revenue, the government is spending much more than it collects in taxes.
“It has to be borrowed from China,” Paul told reporters on Tuesday, referring to the cost of checks. “Maybe we should call them and ask them if they’ll send the checks directly from China.”
“We got a debt of $38 trillion. We don’t need to be handing out any more money,” Rep. Vern Buchanan (R-Fla.), a member of the House committee that oversees taxes, told HuffPost.
“I can’t make that math work,” Rep. David Schweikert (R-Ariz.) said.
The Republican discontent over Trump’s proposal — likely inspired by the popular pandemic-era stimulus checks sent to households by both his and former President Joe Biden’s administrations — illustrates how the GOP’s planned pivot to affordability could force a clash between Trump’s populist instincts and more traditional conservative economic policy.
Top Republicans seemed cool to the payout proposal, saying they hadn’t heard of it — even though Trump brought it up repeatedly for months — or that the details remain unclear.
“I’m not sure what’s being proposed,” House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said Tuesday. “It’s sort of a hypothetical.”
Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.), meanwhile, suggested the tariff revenues would be better used to pay down the debt.
“Obviously I think the amount of money coming in from the tariffs is considered to be substantial at this point and hopefully can be put to a useful purpose,” Thune told reporters on Tuesday. “Again, in my view, one of which would be repaying the debt.”
Several times this year, Trump has suggested sending out tariff “dividends,” and this month seemed to settle on the size of the checks. “A dividend of at least $2000 a person (not including high income people!) will be paid to everyone,” Trump wrote on his website last week. (He’s also previously suggested there would be a dividend from the savings generated by DOGE, which never happened.)
The president brought up the payments spontaneously in the Oval Office on Monday after being asked about tariffs.
“We’re going to be issuing dividends later on, somewhere prior to, you know, probably the middle of next year, a little bit later than that,” Trump said. “Thousands of dollars for individuals of moderate income, middle income.”
Trump’s push for checks comes amid rising public and White House concern about affordability and persistent inflation. The president’s approval numbers have tanked, and voters give him especially poor marks on the economy. He began to pivot this week, canceling some of his tariffs on food imports that have spiked in price, such as coffee and bananas.
The idea of sending checks to households could be more of a rhetorical response to affordability concerns than an actual concrete policy goal, though, as with anything Trump says, it’s hard to be sure. The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
While the details may be unsettled, there’s no question that the idea of sending thousands of dollars directly to American households goes against recent Republican principles on economic policy. Republicans harshly criticized Democrats for sending $1,400 rebate checks in 2021, even though the economy had begun to return to normal following the coronavirus pandemic lockdowns.
As Republicans pointed out every day, the extra spending contributed to inflation, which contributed to Democrats losing elections in both 2022 and 2024. It’s likely another round of checks would juice inflation some more, since the government would essentially be dumping a huge pile of money into the economy.
The conservative Tax Foundation estimated this week that sending $2,000 checks to every tax filer earning less than $100,000 would cost around $279 billion — significantly more than the $158 billion and $207 billion the organization projects tariffs will raise this year and next year.
Patterning the payments after the coronavirus rebates, which phased out for households earning more than $150,000, and were sent to tax filers as well as their dependents, would cost a gigantic $606 billion.
“It seems really unusual why Republicans would want to pursue this policy, given the current circumstances, and especially given that they criticized President Biden four years ago for similar policies,” Alex Durante, a senior economist with the Tax Foundation, told HuffPost.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent suggested, improbably, that maybe the checks would not add to inflation.
“Maybe we could persuade Americans to save that,” Bessent told Fox News on Tuesday.
Still, some Republicans have endorsed the idea. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), a populist Trump ally, introduced a bill that would send at least $600 to every adult and dependent child, with a phaseout for higher earners.
But the more common sentiment among Republicans on Capitol Hill was that it’s not a serious proposal.
“We’ve got to pay down the deficits,” Rep. Blake Moore (R-Utah) told HuffPost. “If one of the benefits of a tariff is to get some revenue, we ought to use it primarily for deficits.”
“We’re facing a deficit this year, around $2 trillion,” Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) said. “I think whatever revenue we get from whatever source ought to go to try and bring down those deficits.”