During an exclusive interview with the One America News network this week, President Donald Trump said his administration is thinking of sending “$1,000 to $2,000” to Americans using revenue from tariffs.
“With the kind of growth, we have now, the debt is very low relatively speaking,” Trump said. “You grow yourself out of that debt. The numbers we have now are bigger than they ever were. We also might make a distribution to the people.”
This idea isn’t new. Former President George Bush sent out checks to Americans in 2001 and 2008. Both Trump and former President Joe Biden also sent out checks during the COVID-19 pandemic. Earlier this year, U.S. Rep. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) proposed $600 rebate checks from the government.
Hawley said on an episode of Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast that his plan to send out $600 checks that wouldn’t include “all the Biden voters.” Trump didn’t seem to mention Biden voters in his comments to OAN, per the outlet’s report.
In the OAN interview, Trump told Daniel Baldwin that there has been a surge of investments in the U.S. and he attributed that to his tariffs. Trump also touted a reduction in the trade deficit and projected that the tariffs will generate trillions of dollars annually on goods coming into the U.S. from other countries.
“We are becoming a country that is so rich, so powerful, it gives us power, so rich,” he said. “And we can take care of people. We can help other countries frankly. But the numbers we’re making, nobody thought it was possible. Now they’re all saying Trump was right.”
In a Sept. 3 press release, the White House said that tariff revenues had already topped $31 billion in August and a total of $158 billion since January. It also said that the tariffs are expected to decrease total national deficits.
“Tariffs bring in revenue to the U.S. government. To the extent new tariffs bring in significant revenue, they could reduce federal deficits and debt,” said the Bipartisan Policy Center think tank in April. “Tariff policies will also influence short- and long-run business decisions about investment and hiring, which may impact other tax collections and spending.”
However, not everyone agrees with Trump’s assessment of tariff revenue. In a piece published by MSNBC Friday for the Maddow Blog, Steve Benen told readers that he expects the rebate check plan “must inevitably end in failure.”
He said that Trump has “wildly” exaggerated tariff revenue. Benen also said that Trump has said that the revenue will go to fund too many different initiatives.
“There’s an old accounting maxim, ‘You can’t spend the same dollar twice,’ and the president might want to familiarize himself with the idea,” he said. Benen added that he doesn’t see tariffs bringing in “even close” to enough money to pay for all the things the president has indicated, including paying down the national debt and sending out checks.
Last month, the Peterson Institute for International Economics said that at an estimated $122 billion as of July, tariff revenues were “contributing just 6.5% of the projected deficit.”
“It is worth noting that federal revenues collected during the fiscal year-to-date (October 2024 to July 2025) are $262 billion higher than the same period in the previous fiscal year, while the federal deficit is $112 billion larger.
But tariff revenues since January 2025 are still only 2.4% of the projected total federal revenue in fiscal year 2025 of $5.2 trillion,” the institute added.
Data from the Tax Foundation think tank indicates that the Trump administration tariffs will “increase federal tax revenues by $171.3 billion,” this year. That’s equivalent to or 0.56% of Gross Domestic Product, “making the tariffs the largest tax hike since 1993,” per the foundation.
Benen also said that “tariffs are, for all intents and purposes, taxes,” and the Congressional Budget Office said that the tariffs are expected to shrink the U.S. economy. According to the CBO, “businesses facing higher costs will, in CBO’s assessment, pass some of their costs on to consumers, putting temporary upward pressure on inflation.”
The Tax Foundation did note that – before calculating foreign retaliation – Trump’s tariffs would be expected to raise $2.3 trillion in revenue over the next decade “on a conventional basis,” but that they would also reduce GDP by 0.8%. If International Emergency Economic Powers Act tariffs on China, Mexico and Canada currently being contested in court would be permanently implemented, the projected revenue would be reduced to $559 billion over 10 years.
Since the start of his term, Trump has started, stopped and re-started various tariffs. Reed Smith has an online tracker for these tariffs and in a Sept. 24 update reported that the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit affirmed the Court of International Trade’s (CIT) holding that “fentanyl” and reciprocal tariffs exceed the President’s authority under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. This update also said the Supreme Court will hear oral argument in the case on Nov. 5.
“Scott Bessent, Trump’s treasury secretary, has said that the government could be forced to refund between $750 billion and $1 trillion in projected revenue if the tariffs are found to be illegal,” said The Independent.
So, are Americans going to get checks?
Yahoo! Finance reported Friday that Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget president Maya MacGuineas said that plan mentioned by the president does come with risks. In particular, she noted that Trump’s approach to use tariffs as a foreign policy tool and an economic tool makes it difficult to rely on the funds as a “permanent structural improvement” to the U.S. revenue stream.
“Structurally, I am worried that we are going to start to count on that revenue and then it’s going to disappear as quickly as it appeared,” she said.
Still, Trump often moves fast on plans once he talks about them, and Americans continue to feel the weight of economic pressures like inflation. We’ll just have to wait and see.