Elon Musk on Tuesday stated that he intends to ask President Trump about what is being called a “DOGE refund,” which would provide checks to American citizens to make up for taxpayer-funded government waste if recommended cuts are ultimately made.
James Fishback, the CEO of investment firm Azoria who has reportedly been serving as an outside advisor to DOGE, pitched the idea of “a tax refund check to be sent after the expiration of DOGE in July 2026 funded exclusively with a portion of the total savings delivered by DOGE” in an X post on Friday.”American taxpayers deserve a ‘DOGE Dividend’: 20% the money that DOGE saves should be sent back to hard-working Americans as a tax refund check. It was their money in the first place!” Fishback wrote.
“At $2 trillion in DOGE savings and 78 million tax-paying households, this is a $5,000 refund per household, with the remaining used to pay down the national debt,” he added before tagging Musk in the post. “@ElonMusk, let’s do this! This is how we rebuild trust in our government.”
Musk responded to the post on Tuesday evening, just after his side-by-side interview with President Trump aired on Fox News. “Will check with the president,” he said. In a follow-up post, Musk noted that the decision will ultimately be up to President Trump, saying, saying: “obviously, the President is the Commander-in-Chief, so this is entirely up to him.”
As of Monday, DOGE is estimating that it has saved American taxpayers roughly $55 billion, according to the running tally on doge.gov. The site states that savings have come from a combination of “fraud detection/deletion, contract/lease cancellations, contract/lease renegotiations, asset sales, grant cancellations, workforce reductions, programmatic changes, and regulatory savings.”
While DOGE lacks the ability to legislate or make cuts outright, it was created through a day one executive order from President Trump, who declared its purpose was to implement the President’s DOGE Agenda, by modernizing Federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity.”
During a press conference on Tuesday, President Trump laid out a number of the most bizarre federal spending projects that have been recommended for cuts by DOGE.
“$25 million to promote biodiversity, conservation, and promote licit livelihoods by developing socially responsible behavior in the country of Colombia. Well, it’s nice, 25 million to go into Colombia for something that nobody ever heard of. $40 million to improve the social and economic inclusion of sedentary migrants. $40 million. $42 million for Johns Hopkins, great place to research and drive social and behavior change in Uganda. $42 million. What about us? What about social change in our country,” the president said. He went on to list dozens of additional examples that amounted to billions in federal spending.
“Well I guess we must be doing the target or doing something right,” Musk said during Tuesday’s joint interview with President Trump. “They wouldn’t be complaining so much if we weren’t doing something useful, I think.”
Musk continued, “And what we’re finding is there’s an unelected bureaucracy, there’s a vast federal bureaucracy that is implacably opposed to the president and the cabinet. And you look at say, D.C. voting, it’s 92 percent Kamala. Ok we’re at 92 percent Kamala, that’s a-lot… I think about that number a-lot. 92 percent, that’s basically almost everyone.”
If the bureaucracy is not reigned in, Musk believes the “will of the people is not being implemented. And that means we don’t live in a democracy, we live in a bureaucracy. And so I think what we’re seeing here is the sort of thrashing of the bureaucracy as we try to restore democracy and the will of the people.”
