Trump-Backed $2,000 Tariff Dividend Payment Requires Legislation, Bessent Says

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Sunday that President Donald Trump’s proposal to send $2,000 tariff payments to certain U.S. residents would require legislation, while he believes the Supreme Court won’t rule against the administration on the legality of the tariffs.

“We will see. We need legislation for that,” Bessent said when asked about the rebates during an interview with Fox News’s “Sunday Morning Futures,” adding the tariff checks would go to “working families.”

Starting earlier this month, Trump has repeatedly suggested that his tariffs could be used to fund the dividend payments and added that low- and middle-income people would be eligible. The president first floated the idea in July.

Trump wrote in a Truth Social post last weekend that “a dividend of at least $2000 a person (not including high income people!) will be paid to everyone.”

Bessent’s comment about the tariffs are the clearest sign yet that the administration will likely have to seek the approval of Congress to issue the payments. Earlier this year, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) proposed a bill that would send a $600 rebate to some Americans, sourced from the tariff revenue.

Speaking to reporters on Air Force One on Friday, Trump said that payments would go out next year to “everybody but the rich” and said that “we’re also going to be reducing debt.”

The talk of dividends being paid from the tariffs comes as the Supreme Court is hearing a lawsuit that challenges the Trump administration’s authority to impose the import duties, many of which were issued starting in April.

But Bessent told Fox News on Sunday that he believes the high court won’t rule against the tariffs because of the significant amount of chaos that could cause.

“I don’t think this ruling is going to go against us, but if it does, what’s [the Supreme Court’s] plan for refunds? Because how is this going to get to consumers? Are they just going to hand some of these importers big windfalls?” the Treasury secretary said on Sunday.

Bessent added that given that prospect, “I don’t think the Supreme Court wants to wade into a mess like that.”

However, he said earlier this month that even if the court rules against the government, the tariffs can be imposed through other means.

The president proposed the tariff rebate idea on his Truth Social media platform on Nov. 9, five days after the Republican party lost elections in Virginia, New Jersey, and elsewhere.

Some analysts have said that there are issues with the payments, which bear some similarity to the Trump administration’s short-lived plan for Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) dividend checks financed by billionaire Elon Musk’s federal budget cuts earlier this year.

“The numbers just don’t check out,” said Erica York, vice president of federal tax policy at the nonpartisan Tax Foundation. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, which has largely been critical of Trump’s economic agenda, also said that not enough revenue is generated from the tariffs to warrant sending out payments.

On Sunday, Bessent stated that people should start feeling more economic relief by the beginning of next year due to a Republican-backed spending and tax bill that passed over the summer.

“So I would expect in the first two quarters we are going to see the inflation curve bend down and the real income curve substantially accelerate,” he said.

Reuters and The Associated Press contributed to this report.