Fox’s Maria Bartiromo Hits Trump-Musk Plan to Send Americans Checks From DOGE Savings: ‘Huge Amount of Debt’

Fox Business anchor Maria Bartiromo voiced her opposition to a plan floated by President Donald Trump ans Elon Musk to return some of the “dividend” from the cuts in federal spending from DOGE to the taxpayers, arguing it would be better to pay down the national debt.

Bartiromo kicked off Thursday’s episode of Mornings With Maria by bringing up the proposal and then later discussed it with her show guests after playing a clip of Trump talking about it.

“I love it,” said Trump about the idea while talking with the press pool at Joint Base Andrews, “Twenty percent dividend, so to speak, for the money that we’re saving by going after the waste and fraud and abuse and all the other things that are happening. I think it’s a great idea.”

When a reporter asked the president how much money he thought it might be, he replied “it could be a lot” and said it would also “give an incentive for the taxpayer to go out and report things where we can save money.”

Bartiromo asked Rep. Richard McCormick (R-GA) if he worried if any of these cuts would “cut into muscle” in any of the federal agencies and what he thought about sending some of the funds to taxpayers.

McCormick said he supported cutting government spending because it would “force us to be more efficient” but he was “not real big on sending money back to people in the form of checks.”

“I’d much rather see the debt paid down –” McCormick said.

“That’s how I feel,” Bartiromo interjected.

“– because, quite frankly,” he continued, “you send it back to the people, we are still building up a huge amount of debt, which we pay interest on — a trillion dollars in debt interest payments per year, that’s more than the military. We need to fix that.”

“To give money back to voters,” said Bartiromo, “it sounds nice and everything but if our worry is debt and deficits, just send the money to the debt and deficits — let’s clean things up.”

Guest Mark Tepper agreed with Bartiromo, commenting that this proposal “looks a lot like” the pandemic stimulus checks, which “led to 9.1% inflation.”

Thursday marked the second day in a row that Bartiromo, a longtime vocal Trump supporter, was openly critical of the president. On Wednesday’s show, she hammered Trump’s comments blaming Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for Russia’s invasion of Zelensky’s country.

Watch the clip above via Fox Business.