House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) said on Sunday that President Trump's plan to send $5,000 dividend checks to American adults if Republicans keep both the House and Senate would require an act of Congress.
"I would assume, yes, he'd need Congress to act, and that’s a creative idea," Johnson told CNN in a "State of the Union" interview.
"We have to figure all that out. But I think what he was articulating … is that he’s saying that, if you want more money in your pocket, you have to keep Republicans in charge," Johnson continued.
Then in a separate interview with NBC's "Meet the Press," Johnson said when asked whether payments would be sent, that he would "commit that Congress will work through it and find consensus on that, like they have to do everything else," adding that "it takes some time."
"I never go out and give big commitments on the front end because I’ve got to work through it, and that’s what we do every single day," he added.
Johnson also told CNN that “pro-growth policies” backed by the Trump administration have led to tax cuts.
“They also have in additional take-home pay an average of $8,000 per filer. By the way, 97 percent of tax filers got a tax cut this year. We cut taxes on tips and overtime, Social Security, all those things,” he said.
During a speech Wednesday night at the GOP's midterm convention in Dallas, Texas, Trump proposed sending every adult American citizen a $5,000 "Trump dividend" if Republicans retain control of both chambers of Congress in November.
"If the Republicans win the House of Representatives and the United States Senate, both of them," Trump said, "I will issue a dividend to every adult citizen in the United States of America for $5,000."
Trump told the audience at the American Airlines Center: "Your vote will decide whether our country stumbles at the starting gate of our next 250 years or surges forward and never looks back."
A $5,000 payout to 270 million adults would cost the US government approximately $1.35 trillion. The proposal comes as US public debt surpassed $40 trillion for the first time in recent weeks.