President Donald Trump has promised $5,000 to every American adult if Republicans retain control of the House of Representatives and the Senate in November’s midterm elections.
The pledge has raised questions about its legality, its cost and where the money would come from. Federal law prohibits offering payments in exchange for votes and separately restricts promises of federally funded benefits in return for political support. Any such payment would in any case require congressional authorization, as the US Constitution bars the president from spending Treasury funds without an appropriation made by law. During the Covid pandemic, Congress approved payouts to income-eligible tax filers and their dependents only, a narrower approach that would lower the cost further. Almost certainly. This is a serious problem for Trump as he faces voter anger over costs of living. Research published by the Federal Reserve Bank of St.
Because it is more in the nature of a campaign promise and would apply to all adult Americans regardless of how they voted, trump’s offer would appear to skirt these prohibitions. Because of the energy shock from the Iran war, injecting roughly $1.27 trillion into consumer hands would stir demand in an economy where prices are already rising, partly. Trump has made similar pledges in the past which never came about, including promising Americans $2,000 checks from tariff revenues and $5,000 checks from savings made from drastic federal job cuts. There are about 276.8 million adults aged 18 and over in the United States, according to Congressional Budget Office data, and doling out $5,000 to each would come to $1.384 trillion. Restricting the payments to US citizens would reduce that figure to about $1.27 trillion. The three rounds of pandemic stimulus checks approved in 2020 and 2021 came to about $814 billion in total, according to federal oversight data. US consumer inflation is running at 3.4 percent, well above the central bank’s two percent long-term target. Louis estimated that pandemic-era fiscal stimulus, which also included support for businesses, added about 2.6 percentage points to US inflation.
But Trump told CBS News Texas he did not think Congress would need to approve the payments, without going into details. Trump said he was targeting “every American. Direct cash handouts of this kind are sometimes described by economists as “helicopter money” — a term for no-strings-attached payouts from a central bank, meant to jolt an economy out of deflation, the opposite of the price pressures the United States faces now.
Not anytime soon. Moreover, the Supreme Court struck down many of Trump’s tariffs in February, forcing the US Treasury to refund importers with interest, and net customs revenue turned negative in May through July. Democratic reaction to Trump’s proposal was withering.
The government collected a record $195 billion in customs duties in fiscal 2025, meaning a $1.4 trillion payout would consume roughly seven years of revenues from Trump’s trade policies.
The Tax Foundation, a right-leaning think tank, estimates that spending over $1 trillion on a new one-time payment program “would balloon the deficit to nearly $3 trillion,” even with revenue from Trump’s remaining tariffs. California Governor Gavin Newsom, a potential 2028 Democratic presidential candidate, condemned the pledge as coming from “the most corrupt man ever to occupy the Oval Office.”
“After making you sicker and poorer with his war, Donald Trump now wants to buy your vote with $5,000 in taxpayer-funded blood money,” Newsom said on X. Representative Jamie Raskin, a Democrat from Maryland, said Trump’s pledge was just the latest move in a “fantastically reckless and dysfunctional presidency. “So after adding trillions of dollars to the national debt, driving it over an unprecedented $40 trillion, Trump now offers everyone a $5,000 political bribe (“the Trump Dividend”) if we elect Republicans to run Congress,” Raskin said. (Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
