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U.S. President Donald Trump has promised US$5,000 to every American adult if Republicans retain control of the House of Representatives and the Senate in November’s midterm elections.

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The pledge has raised questions about its legality, its cost and where the money would come from.

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Is it legal?

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Federal law prohibits offering payments in exchange for votes and separately restricts promises of federally funded benefits in return for political support.

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Trump’s offer would appear to skirt these prohibitions because it is more in the nature of a campaign promise and would apply to all adult Americans regardless of how they voted.

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Any such payment would in any case require congressional authorization, as the U.S. Constitution bars the president from spending Treasury funds without an appropriation made by law.

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But Trump told CBS News Texas he did not think Congress would need to approve the payments, without going into details.

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Trump has made similar pledges in the past which never came about, including promising Americans US$2,000 checks from tariff revenues and US$5,000 checks from savings made from drastic federal job cuts.

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How much would it cost?

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There are about 276.8 million adults aged 18 and over in the United States, according to Congressional Budget Office data, and doling out US$5,000 to each would come to US$1.384 trillion.

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Trump said he was targeting “every American.” Restricting the payments to U.S. citizens would reduce that figure to about US$1.27 trillion.

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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.

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The three rounds of pandemic stimulus checks approved in 2020 and 2021 came to about US$814 billion in total, according to federal oversight data.

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Would the checks make inflation worse?

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Almost certainly. This is a serious problem for Trump as he faces voter anger over costs of living.

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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.

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U.S. consumer inflation is running at 3.4 per cent, well above the central bank’s two per cent long-term target. Injecting roughly US$1.27 trillion into consumer hands would stir demand in an economy where prices are already rising, partly because of the energy shock from the Iran war.

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Research published by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis estimated that pandemic-era fiscal stimulus, which also included support for businesses, added about 2.6 percentage points to U.S. inflation.

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Could tariff money pay for Trump’s new promise?

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Not anytime soon. The government collected a record US$195 billion in customs duties in fiscal 2025, meaning a US$1.4 trillion payout would consume roughly seven years of revenues from Trump’s trade policies.