Is it ‘official’ that Trump approved a $5,000 ‘DOGE dividend’ stimulus? No.

As billionaire Elon Musk aims to slash government spending through the Department of Government Efficiency, some social media users are claiming the money is on its way back to taxpayers.

A Feb. 23 Facebook post read, "Well it’s official, (President Donald) Trump to sign order from Elon Musk, giving taxpayers who have filed their 2024 tax returns, a stimulus check for $5,000; not $1,200."

This post was flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and Threads.)

An X user shared a similar post that read, "It’s official! $5,000 DOGE Stimulus Checks confirmed by Trump!" The post shared an edited image of a U.S. Treasury Department check for $5,000 with photos of Trump and Musk and text that read, "DOGE checks approved."

Although the idea of sending Americans $5,000 checks from the money DOGE saved has been floated, and Trump has mentioned it in speeches, Trump has not officially signed off on this. PolitiFact found no White House announcements or news reports about Trump signing off on this. We contacted the White House, but did not receive a response before publication.

Any plan to provide stimulus checks to Americans would need congressional approval, as was the case for the stimulus checks approved during the COVID-19 pandemic.

James Fishback, CEO and cofounder of investment firm Azoria Partners, which has held events at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, proposed the plan Feb. 14 on X and tagged Musk.

"American taxpayers deserve a ‘DOGE Dividend’: 20% (of) the money that DOGE saves should be sent back to hard-working Americans as a tax refund check," Fishback wrote. "At $2 trillion in DOGE savings and 78 million tax-paying households, this is a $5,000 refund per household, with the remaining used to pay down the national debt."

However, it’s unclear whether DOGE will save enough money to make this proposal feasible.

DOGE’s website said Feb. 24 that its estimated savings total $55 billion, but this doesn’t add up according to the site’s "wall of receipts," which supposedly tracks the cuts DOGE has made. The list of government contracts and real estate DOGE says it’s canceled amount to about $8.6 billion in savings. DOGE has not accounted for the remaining $46.4 billion.

The savings so far are a long way from DOGE’s initial goal of cutting $2 trillion from the federal government’s budget, which totaled $6.8 trillion last fiscal year. Musk said in January that $2 trillion was a "best-case outcome," and there was a "good shot" at achieving $1 trillion in savings.

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Fishback shared a longer version of his DOGE dividend plan in a Feb. 18 X post. He proposed sending the tax refund checks after July 2026, when DOGE is set to expire.

Musk replied to Fishback’s post, saying he "will check with the president."

On Feb. 19, Trump told reporters at the Saudi Arabia-backed Future Investment Initiative Institute’s Priority Summit in Miami that he was considering "a new concept where we give 20% of the DOGE savings to American citizens and 20% goes to paying down debt."

Later that day, when a reporter asked about the proposal on Air Force One, Trump said, "I love it. A 20% 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."

But it’s not "official" that Trump signed an order to give Americans $5,000 stimulus checks.

We rate this claim False.

RELATED: DOGE touts billions in canceled government contracts. Where are the numbers coming from?