Image by the White House 12/18/25/press release
President Donald Trump may have $2,000 tariff dividend checks on his wish list for 2026. But Congress will have something to say about it.
For months, Trump has discussed his plan of giving Americans a tariff dividend refund in 2026.
“Next year is projected to be the largest tax refund season ever, and we’re going to be giving back refunds out of the tariffs, as we have taken in literally trillions of dollars,” Trump said during a Dec. 2 cabinet meeting. “We’re going to be giving a nice dividend to the people in addition to reducing debt.”
But there’s still no guarantee that these checks will go out, or if they even should. On Dec. 18, the president announced he was sending $1,776 checks, called “Warrior dividends,” to the nation’s 1.45 million service members before Christmas. The Defense Department supplied the funding for those, the Pentagon said.
However, the tariff dividend checks would likely require legislation passed by Congress before getting signed by the president, White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett said Sunday, Dec. 21 on CBS News’ “Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan.”
“The deficit relative to last year is down by $600 billion and so, in the summer, I wasn’t so sure that there was space for a check like that. But now I’m pretty sure that there is, and so, I would expect that in the new year, the president will bring forth a proposal to Congress to make that happen,” said Hassett, the director of the White House’s National Economic Council.
How will the admnistration fund $2,000 tariff dividend checks?
While Trump has said the money for the checks would come from tariff revenue, Hassett said that’s just one possibility.
“We get taxes, we get tariffs, we get revenue from lots of places, and then Congress decides how to spend those monies,” he told Brennan. “That’s an appropriation. And so this would have to be money that would be an appropriation.”
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent also told Maria Bartiromo the same thing on Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures” on Nov. 16. He had previously said, during a Nov. 12 interview on Fox News that White House discussions involved rebates for “families making less than, say, $100,000.”
Will we get $2,000 dividend checks?
We don’t really know yet.
Trump has said tariff revenue could lead to “a little rebate, but the big thing we want to do is pay down debt.” The rebates would arrive in “the middle of next year,” he said.
But some experts consider the checks unwise and not likely to happen, mainly because the numbers just don’t make sense.
The tariff dividends could add up to $300 billion or more, estimated Erica York, vice president of federal tax policy for the non-partisan Tax Foundation. “Only problem,” she said in a post on X on Nov. 9, “new tariffs have raised $120 billion so far,” while the net revenue of tariffs in fiscal year 2026, which began Oct. 1, would be about $216 billion.
The Tax Foundation estimates Trump’s tariffs will raise $2.1 trillion in revenue over the next decade, but that dips to $1.6 trillion after accounting for foreign retaliation and other negative economic effects.
The Congressional Budget Office has projected tariff revenue of $3.3 trillion over a decade, amounting to a total value of about $4 trillion to the government as it pays off debt faster and reduces interest payments.
A better idea would be to simply roll back the tariffs, Scott Lincicome, vice president of general economics at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, said in a post on X on Nov. 17. “Giving Americans their own money back is inefficient redistribution, & new, debt-financed stimulus checks could be inflationary,” he said.
A plan for tariff dividend checks could also be thwarted if many of Trump’s tariffs are struck down by the Supreme Court, which seemed to question whether Trump has the power to impose tariffs when listening to arguments on Nov. 5.
In July, Congress has a chance to pass rebates for tariffs in the American Worker Rebate Act of 2025, proposed by Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Miss. The bill, which hasn’t passed yet, would result in rebate checks of at least $600 per individual to U.S. residents; a family of four could receive up to $2,400.
CBS News’ Brennan summed things up after Hassett told her about the need for Congress to pass legislation: “So don’t bank on it, in other words,” she said.
Mike Snider is a national trending news reporter for USA TODAY. You can follow him on Threads, Bluesky, X and email him at mikegsnider & @mikegsnider.bsky.social & @mikesnider & msnider@usatoday.com.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: The latest on President Trump’s $2,000 tariff dividend checks for 2026
