President Donald Trump has proposed using funds from tariffs to pay a dividend to many Americans while cutting national debt.
President Donald Trump is committed to paying $2,000 to many Americans from funds from tariff revenues, the White House said on Nov. 12, adding that officials are exploring how to make the president’s proposal happen.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters at the White House that Trump’s team is mulling all legal options for the dividend, which the president first mentioned over the weekend.
“The White House is committed to making that happen,” Leavitt said. “The president made it clear he wants to make it happen, and so his team of economic advisers are looking into it.”
In a Nov. 9 post on Truth Social, Trump celebrated the tariffs, highlighting the funds they are bringing into the government.
He suggested using part of these funds to send a dividend of at least $2,000 to Americans, excluding those in high-income brackets, while also utilizing revenues to reduce the nation’s $37 trillion debt.
“We are taking in Trillions of Dollars and will soon begin paying down our ENORMOUS DEBT, $37 Trillion,” Trump wrote on social media. “Record Investment in the USA, plants and factories going up all over the place. A dividend of at least $2000 a person (not including high income people!) will be paid to everyone.”
The president has also called critics of his tariff policies “fools.”
The Supreme Court heard arguments on the administration’s use of tariffs under the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act and is set to rule on the case in the coming weeks or months. Trump has said he is confident in his administration’s arguments and is hopeful that a decision will be made in his favor.
Trump has said the case is one of the most important in the nation’s history, highlighting that the tariffs are a “defensive mechanism” for the United States.
A 100 percent tariff on China led to a “wonderful deal for everybody,” Trump told reporters last week.
“If we didn’t have the tariffs, we wouldn’t have been able to do that,” he said.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who attended the Supreme Court arguments regarding tariffs, said in recent statements that the dividend could be in the form of tax cuts rather than direct payments and limited to families making less than $100,000 annually.
“I haven’t spoken to the president about this yet, but ... the $2,000 dividend could come in lots of forms, in lots of ways,” Bessent told ABC News on Nov. 9.
“It could be just the tax decreases that we are seeing on the president’s agenda. You know, no tax on tips, no tax on overtime, no tax on Social Security,” Bessent also said, noting that those items are “substantial deductions” that are currently “being financed in the tax bill.”
In February, Trump floated an idea of providing a payment through savings initiated by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), although there has been little talk about it since then.