Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said President Donald Trump’s promised $5,000 “dividend” checks for all U.S. adults would not be paid with taxpayer dollars — even as other officials offered conflicting funding stories and Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) called the uncapped plan “extraordinarily costly.”

The comments land one day after Trump’s Dallas midterm-convention pledge of a $5,000 payment to every adult citizen if Republicans keep the House and Senate — a promise Insanity Developing covered without a spelled-out funding bill. Friday’s briefing scramble is the first serious attempt to explain where the money would come from.

“It’s not tax money,” Lutnick told NBC News in an interview at the 9/11 Memorial & Museum. He claimed the administration could “earn the money that Donald Trump wants to pay out, not from the deficit, and not from taxpayers.”

“Together we’re going to deliver that plan and we’re going to pay that money to the Americans, and not from taxpayer money,” Lutnick said.

His two showpiece revenue stories are speculative on the ledger. He pointed to the upcoming Commerce “Trump Platinum Card,” which would let wealthy applicants pay $5 million to extend U.S. visas by 270 days. “We have a waitlist of more than 100,000 people who want to come,” Lutnick said. “That’s $500 billion dollars.” That arithmetic assumes every waitlisted applicant both qualifies and pays in full — a projection, not cash in the Treasury.

He also cited the administration’s Intel stake: roughly 500 million shares acquired with about $8.9 billion in appropriated CHIPS Act funds at roughly $20.47 a share. With the stock near $100.32 as of Thursday, Lutnick said “we’re up $50 billion.” NBC noted the shares have not been sold — so the gain remains on paper, not spendable cash for checks.

Other officials are telling a different story. On Friday, National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett told Bloomberg Television the White House was considering a congressional reconciliation process to fund the checks — the ordinary budget path for deficit-financed spending. Initial estimates put the plan’s cost around $1.3 trillion.

Vice President JD Vance suggested Wednesday that tariff revenues could cover the payments. The nonpartisan Tax Foundation has noted that even before the Supreme Court ordered hundreds of billions in tariff refunds, collections would not have come close to a trillion-plus cash drop.

The accounting distinction matters. Calling something “not tax money” does not erase the fiscal trade-off: every dollar mailed as a check is a dollar the government cannot use to pay down debt, fund programs, or cut taxes elsewhere. The national debt has already topped $40 trillion; the annual deficit is nearing $1.8 trillion, its highest since March 2021, NBC reported.

Republican skepticism surfaced from inside the party. In a statement to the Washington Examiner, Collins said: “From the few details we have, it seems that the proposed $5,000 dividend would not have an income cap and would be extraordinarily costly.”

Lutnick graded the economy an “A-” and pitched $2 gas through more Venezuelan and Iranian oil production — while the national average for regular was above $4.29 on Friday. August CPI rose 0.4% month over month, with core inflation hotter than expected, NBC reported.

Paper markups, waitlists, and tariff hopes are not appropriations. A $5,000-per-adult transfer still has to clear Congress, the Treasury, and the debt markets — and an uncapped trillion-dollar check run arrives with the tab already north of $40 trillion.

Sources