Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent hints at income limit on Trump’s $2,000 tariff checks
WASHINGTON — Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent revealed that the Trump administration has discussed restricting the president’s proposed $2,000 tariff dividend to families making less than six figures.
“Well, there are a lot of options here that the president’s talking about a $2,000 rebate and those — that would be for families making less than, say, $100,000,” Bessent told “Fox & Friends” Wednesday.
“We haven’t,” Bessent clarified when asked if the Trump administration had decided on that limit. “It’s in discussion.”
Last week, following a brutal hearing over his “trafficking” and “reciprocal” tariffs before the Supreme Court, President Trump floated a $2,000 dividend but did not elaborate on specifics on how that would work.
Bessent later told ABC’s “This Week” that the dividend “could come in lots of forms” and that it “could be just the tax decreases that we are seeing.” That’s a reference to tax cuts including in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act that was signed into law earlier this year.
The Treasury secretary reiterated Wednesday that “what we did with the tax bill is actually financing the president’s no tax and tips, overtime, Social Security, and the big refunds you’re going to see are a result of that.”
He also pointed to the so-called “Trump accounts” nestled in the marquee megalaw in which the US government will automatically open an account for children under the age of 18?between 2025 and 2028?and contribute a one-time $1,000 deposit to those accounts.
Questions have long swirled over how Trump’s $2,000 tariff dividend proposal would work. On Sunday, Trump had teased that “a dividend of at least $2000 a person (not including high income people!) will be paid to everyone.”
But Congress would have to sign off on any major cash payments to American families at that scale and some Republicans previously pumped the brakes on the idea.
“It’ll never pass,” Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio), whom Vice President JD Vance backed in a primary contest last year, bluntly told reporters in July, according to?Business Insider. “We have a $37 trillion debt.”
Trump’s International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) tariffs — the specific type of duties that are under threat of getting scrapped by the Supreme Court — have only raked in about $90 billion between their implementation and Sept. 23, according to data from US Customs and Border Patrol.
For comparison, a COVID-19-era proposal to fire off $2,000 checks to families was estimated to cost some $464 billion, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.
Even if the $2,000 payments were narrowed to individuals earning under $100,000, it would still have a roughly $300 billion pricetag, per an estimate from Erica York, the Tax Foundation’s vice president of federal tax policy.
Further complicating all of this are fears that if the Supreme Court rules against Trump on the IEEPA tariffs, it may require him to refund importers.
Counting all tariffs, including the non-IEEPA ones that were not at issue before the Supreme Court, the government took in $195.9 billion for all its duties in fiscal year 2025 as of Aug. 31, according to US Customs and Border Patrol data.
Trump took an on-again, off-again approach to his tariff implementation this year amid a series of lightning negotiations with various countries, which means that tariffs could raise significantly higher revenue in fiscal year 2026.
Talk of a tariff dividend comes against the backdrop of voter concerns about affordability, an issue that was center stage during the Democrats’ sweep of last week’s off-year elections.
“We inherited this affordability mess. It was the worst inflation, 40, 50 years,” Bessent contended. “Imagine two lines. There is the inflation line; we’ve got that under control. It’s leveled out. That is going to start turning down.”
“And there’s the income line, which under [President Joe] Biden, because so many of the jobs were government jobs, you can’t get real wage growth from a government job, real wages are going to increase.”
