Up to $5,000 at stake: Who wouldn’t qualify for DOGE stimulus check being pushed by Trump and Musk

“We’re considering giving 20% of the DOGE savings to American citizens and 20% to paying down the debt,” Trump said last month, prompting a wave of enthusiasm from some who are yet to see the benefits of DOGE, the Elon Musk-mounted Department of Government Efficiency.

However, as has been the way with DOGE so far, things are not as cut and dry as they perhaps seem from the outside. While indeed people have received various stimulus checks in 2025, the one floated by the Trump-Musk tag-team looks far off - it hasn’t even been approved by Congress.

The idea of DOGE paychecks going to American citizens was first proposed, as is the way in the modern world, on Twitter. It was a little-known investor James Fishback who came up with the idea of giving the American people the money from dismantled government bodies instead of it being pocketed by you-know-who.

DOGE stimulus checks explained

“There’s even under consideration a new concept where we give 20% of the DOGE savings to American citizens, and 20% goes to paying down debt, because the numbers are incredible, Elon,” Trump said shortly after the 4-page proposal began to gain momentum online and made its way into the Oval Office.

While it’s true that the idea of Trump giving money back to the people that elected him, it’s very unlikely that any low-income families would ever see any of it. How can you tell if you’re low income or not? Great question.

In his proposal, Fishback puts it like this: going off the idea that DOGE will make a total of $2 trillion in cuts to the government - a disputed figure in its own right - he takes 20% of those savings, or $400 billion, and divides them among 79 million taxpaying households. Bingo, everyone gets $5,000 each - right?

Who would receive the DOGE stimulus checks?

Wrong. Those 79 million Americans are - and this is the crucial step - net-income taxpayers — people who pay more in taxes than they get back: lower-income Americans do not qualify for the checks.

In case you’re wondering, Americans who have a gross income of under $40,000 pay little to no federal income tax, meaning that they would not be on the list of those set to benefit.

On those lower-income Americans being left out of DOGE’s $2 trillion spending pot of magic money, Fishback went on the offensive to the lower earners, writing that “a lot of low-income households essentially saw transfer payments of 25 to 30% of their annual … income" when it came to COVID checks that kept millions afloat.

“This exclusively goes to households that are net-payers of federal income tax, and what that means is that they have a lower propensity to spend and a higher propensity to save a transfer payment like the DOGE dividend.” Once again America’s most needy are being left to fend for themselves, with an us vs them media rhetoric being pushed to keep their minds away from blaming those who actually make the decisions.

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Whatever the case, it seems we may be waiting a while. While DOGE cuts may be making headlines and their website claims to show every single cent of saved money, the cuts have not been able to stand up to the lightest scrutiny and mistakes - such as claiming an $8 billion saving that turned out to be $8 million - have been commonplace throughout the 7-week (yes, that’s all) Trump administration.

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