the true cost of Trump Accounts

When you're born in the United States, you get a social security number. It's a central promise of our society. It's a central promise. Ring the bell. Donald Trump signed a bill into law that would give $1,000 to every newborn in the United States. These are called Trump accounts. And investment accounts for kids known as Trump accounts. I think we're going to create a generation of shareholders. To make everybody a capitalist from birth. Under my America by Design executive order, Joe and his design team have been working to make your government more beautiful, more modern, convenient and effective. Because that's like an Olympic sized trust that you have to build. They've built the amazing experience behind Trumpaccounts.gov. The conduit is design. Goo goo ga ga, baba now. That is toddler for Deborah. Please put me through to my financial advisor. I need to diversify my portfolios. Yes, today we are talking about Trump accounts, the investment accounts for babies. So pack those bags, kids, because you are going to Wall Street. Which, come to think of it, might actually be a pretty good fit for a tiny human who likes to scream all day, make a mess in their pants, and yet somehow still can be named senior vice president by the end of Q3. So while your eight-month-old packs away its pressed suits and Patagonia vests, I think you and I should talk about Trump accounts and what the real cost to opening one is. This investigation is a continuation of my reporting on the National Design Studio. So if you haven't already, I urge you to go over to my substack and read the two pieces that I've published on them already. I found a second vote.gov and Trump is building a new passports.gov. And both of those websites, along with hundreds of other websites like trumpaccounts.gov, are registered to the National Design Studio under the executive office of the president. And recently, Jason Wilson, who's a wonderful journalist with The Guardian, had picked up the National Design Studio thread and was able to corroborate my findings and push the investigation further. So I also recommend going and giving that a read because honestly, the National Design Studio might be one of the most important stories that nobody is really watching right now or at least really knows about. We need to change that, like now, because if you care about where this country is going at all, your liberties, the whole democratic thing that we're all supposed to be holding onto, then it's worth understanding what the National Design Studio is building right under our noses. And while comprised of the many familiar faces of Doge, NDS is a lot more sophisticated. It's moving meticulously and quickly, and what they're building is, well, you'll see. One of National Design Studios' many build-outs is Trump Accounts. When you open one for your kid, the government drops $1,000 of seed money into it, and it sits there in this index fund and grows until the child turns 18, with some conditions, of course, which we'll get into in a minute. But the basic pitch is that it's this nest egg for every American baby. You know, put a little money into the market at birth, let it compound for 18 years, and then the kid has something when they grow up. Now, on its face, that's not half a bad idea. I mean, it's also not really a new idea. Both parties have floated different versions of the same thing, more or less, for many years. There is one, you know, teeny tiny difference with this version, which we'll get back to in a minute. But first, I want to wind this back to the conception, no pun intended, of this whole idea, Trump accounts. Because what a lot of people I don't think realize is that this idea did not come out of nowhere. Oh no, this idea was birthed from the brilliant minds of the one big beautiful bill. That's right, you remember that? Old thing, the one big beautiful bill, the thousand page bill that nearly half of Congress pretended to read before signing it? Well, as it turns out, buried in section number 70,204 is Trump accounts. And the OBBB lays out the entire plan in detail, starting with the fact that the Treasury Department is running the program. Except for the small problem that the Treasury doesn't build apps or hold millions of brokerage accounts. So it's going to run it next to other companies that can do the actual work, like Bank of New York Mellon and Robinhood. As you might assume, Bank of New York Mellon is going to hold the money for Trump accounts, and Robinhood is going to build the app that runs the accounts. And so in some ways, the Treasury is just a brand on the accounts. Sorry, no, that's National Design Studio. That's the brand of these accounts. So what the heck does the Treasury do again? Because Trump accounts is run through private companies. And, you know, the closer you look at who those companies are, the more you realize that the savings account is just the wrapper of this whole thing and not necessarily the point. Because what they're actually opening is this unified permanent data file on your child. And the thousand dollars was just the bait to get you to say yes. And look, allow me just to be honest upfront that I am not a financial advisor. This is not financial advice. I'm no economist, right? If anything, I'm a data sovereigntist, which means I'm not here to tell you whether or not a thousand dollars in your kid's index fund is the right move for your family. I'm here to talk about all of the strings attached to that index fund before you make that kind of decision. Because you and I both know that private companies are not in the business of charity. And when you mix those private companies with the government, well, the whole thing kind of turns into, how do you say, a tyranny? Which, while we're on the topic, let's go ahead and talk about Robinhood, okay? Because this is the company that's actually running these accounts, right? The one that the Treasury handed this whole operation to. So for those of you who don't know, Robinhood is a stock trading app. It's a phone app basically that lets ordinary people buy and sell stocks themselves without a broker. You know, you just tap a couple of buttons and now you own Apple stocks. Easy as that. But the whole build out around Robinhood has always been surrounding one word. Free. That's right. They take no commissions. You could buy and sell all day long and pay nothing to do it. You know, it kind of in some ways feels like a gift from big tech. Right? This is a gift from big tech, right? Yeah, no. No, there's always a catch with these companies, isn't there? Because if you're not paying, then how's the company staying alive? Yeah, well, the answer, more often than not in these kinds of situations, is because you turn out to be the product. Well, Robinhood was doing something a little tricky and kind of clever. When you would tap buy on any of these stocks, it would feel like Robinhood is going out and fetching you some share, right? When in reality, it doesn't. It sells your shares to a giant trading firm, and then that firm would pay Robinhood for the right to handle those shares. Because your order is actually worth money to those firms. Regular people's trades are steady, and they're low risk. What they were doing was something called payment for order flow, and at its peak, it was about 81% of Robinhood's revenue. And here you thought you were the customer for Robinhood, meanwhile you were the thing that they were selling. and that matters because a broker is supposed to be able to get you the best price in the stock market, right? That's their job. But herein lies the problem with Robinhood replacing that because once it's paid to route your order to whoever pays the most, then it's interest in yours split apart. And the SEC even found that Robinhood's customers got the worst prices on a lot of orders, enough to eat up what they'd saved on commissions. And so Robinhood got slapped with the big old fine for hiding it from their customers. And that $65 million fine in 2020 was not the last of them. In fact, a few months later, the industry's own regulator, FINRA, hit Robinhood with the largest fine in history. $70 million for outages that were locking people out of their accounts while the market was moving fast, misleading customers, and pushing inexperienced people into risky trades. And last year, they were fined again because Robinhood kept throwing all of this animated confetti across your screen for every trade like a slot machine in Reno just paying you out And Massachusetts regulators sued over it arguing that the app was built to keep inexperienced people trading past the point that was good for them So that ladies and gentlemen is the company that the Treasury put in charge of your child's account. Okay, so they picked Robinhood, right? And it's the Treasury Department that's going to put the $1,000 into the bank accounts of these children. How is Robinhood getting paid? I mean, they said that Robinhood isn't going to be charging parents anything. No commission, no account fees, you know, the free that they built their entire brand on. Well, as it turns out, the money is sitting right there in the same law that created Trump accounts. That's right. In section 70,204, Congress set aside $410 million for Treasury to implement and operate the program through 2034. And I was able to find a document where Robinhood told investors that its work was being done in a cost plus basis with a small margin. Yeah, but it can't be that small because the Treasury is going to reimburse Robin Hood for the cost of building the app, running the infrastructure and supporting the accounts, and then is going to pay a little more on top of that, along with filling every account with $1,000 per opening it. That seems like a lot of money. And so when Robin Hood says that there are no fees for parents, like, yeah, I guess that's partially true that the parents does not pay Robin Hood directly, but the Treasury is paying Robin Hood directly. And the Treasury gets money from Congress. And Congress appropriated that money for the program last year when they signed the big, beautiful bill. And that money comes from us. That's public money. We're paying for these Trump accounts. And gosh, when you put it like that and you say it out loud, there's something about it that sounds kind of familiar. Where have I heard a government program where the taxpayer chips in for other people's kids whether they have any or not. What is that? Oh yeah, socialism. That sounds a whole lot like socialism, which is just rich coming from an administration that screams communism the second they see Mayor Mondami feeding some pigeons some leftover breadcrumbs. Have we considered that maybe those who scream communism might in fact be totalitarian leaders? I don't know. Okay, so we know how Robin Hood is getting paid, but my question is, what is the Trump administration getting out of this? You know, because $400 million with all of this work going into it and all the accounts getting filled, that money's not going to go a long way. You know, they're not going to be able to grift off the top of it in any meaningful way to make it all worth this hassle. So what are they getting off of it? Well, after following a little paper trail to see what happens when you open an account, I think I've figured out what they're getting from this. Because here's what actually happens when you go to open a Trump account. You get asked to upload your government ID, which is pretty routine, you know, and then you get asked to take a selfie so that they can match your face to that ID to make sure it's actually you. And while that might all sound pretty par for the course and mundane, the selfie is the part that nobody seems to clock because that, my friends, is your biometric scan getting attached to that account. While they might say they're just matching your face to your ID, that is not actually what's happening here. They're not comparing two photos. They have a software that is measuring the geometry of your face and it's turning it into data It's going to be one of those that you can take on your own cell phone But you're going to have to look to the left, look to the right Maybe do a little up, a little down, a little close, a little far They're going to map that whole face And to be clear, that is your face Like the parent's face is the one that's opening the account The adult, not the baby's And even though Robinhood says they can take your biometrics They're not even the one doing the biometric scanning themselves It's a completely different company, an outside vendor called Persona. Persona is an identity verification company. It's this outside contractor that a lot of apps actually use to confirm that you are who you say you are. And so technically, when you're signing up for the Trump account on the Robinhood app, you're using the Persona software to scan your face. We actually know quite an unusual amount for how Persona operates, considering that in February of 2026, that's this year, a security researcher found that the company's entire government dashboard was sitting on a public server. This is over 53 megabytes of source code, and more than 2,000 files were reachable by anybody who just wanted to type in the address. And those blueprints showed us what Persona actually does. What the source code told us is that Persona runs over 269 separate checks when you upload your picture. Yeah, apparently it screens the person against adverse media databases across 14 different categories, including, but not limited to, terrorism, espionage, and human trafficking. Yeah, apparently it can run your face against photographs of public figures and politicians and score how close the math is. And it's because it was built to file something called a suspicious activity report, which is a secret report built on you, but you're not allowed to be told about. and it's directly filed to Sinfin, the Treasury Department's Financial Crimes Unit, and to its Canadian equivalent. And the research confirms that the customer version and the government version run on the same code. Like literally matching the software line for line, it is the exact same code. Before anybody loses their marbles here, I am not trying to tell you that everybody who opens a Trump account is going to automatically get run through a terrorism screening. I am just simply describing what the platform is built to do. Allegedly according to the code that was found Which is a fact so it's not even alleged Allegedly In fact there's a useful comparison here Because there was another company who faced this exact vendor Discord That's right a chat app that decided to do age verification Was using Persona to check the ages of its users And when the exposure went public All of a sudden Discord cut ties with Persona Within the same month But Robinhood Pfft no Robinhood decided to stay partnered with them You know they're in for the long haul here because now they're going to be the ones processing the parents' faces and binding them together with their children's social security numbers and creating a financial database for each of their children. And they decided to keep that partnership. So how do we enforce a standard for the bare minimum? You know, asking for a friend. And here's why you got to be extra, extra careful because what happens to your face after you scan it is no longer in your control, like ever, indefinitely. because on Robinhood's own data pages, they say that you can download almost everything that the company holds on you, except the one thing that you can't download is your biometric data because it's walled off in a separate category so that you can't download it, review it, or delete it ever. So just be warned that once your face goes in, there is no button to take it out. So essentially, you scan your face and that scan gets tied to your child's social security number and that's the account. Well, at least that's what opening an account looks like right now. But don't forget that right now, this is voluntary, right? This is a pilot program. You go, you sign your kid up, and the government drops a thousand dollars to sweeten the deal a little bit. And the pitch that everybody's been hearing is exactly that simple. Free money for your baby. And what kind of monster says no to free money for a baby, right? But if you read a little bit deeper into this and what's actually being rolled out, they tell you exactly where this is going because it does not stop here at this pilot program. Because on July 3rd, the Social Security Administration put out a statement saying that they are working with hospitals to fold the account, meaning the Trump account, directly into the birth process. And their exact phrasing was, and I quote, starting next week, Social Security will update guidance to hospitals to include Trump account enrollment information. SSA will assist the states to modify their existing hospital forms used by parents to apply for Social Security numbers through the EAB program to include the automatic creation of a Trump account. Now, they I didn give an exact date as to when all of this would be finalized but they did say in early July next week And by the looks of it it past next week So they were describing a world in which you have a baby fill out some ordinary paperwork that a baby gets, like for a social security number in the hospital, and the social security account arrives with a Trump account. You know, before you've even left the hospital, your baby's a part of Wall Street. And so they are paying you to say yes right now. And at the exact same time, they are building a version where they don't even have to ask. Now, maybe a large portion of you are exhaling because you're thinking, oh, thank goodness, I'm not the one having a baby right now. Or maybe your kid's already 10 years old or 14 years old, and you're thinking that this is a new parent problem, not a you problem. Well, I would stop you before you exhale too much because unfortunately, they seem to have accounted for your child as well. Yeah, the law that they're trying to enact, I don't think stops at newborns. Because remember, any child under the age of 18 qualifies for a Trump account. You can open a Trump account for your kid at any point. Now, of course, if you want the $1,000 attributed into the account, then you have to be born, I believe, after 2025, but before 2028. But alas, you can still have a Trump account as long as you're under 18. And they seem to have built themselves a second door for the kids who are already born. You see, because there's a line in the one big, beautiful bill that hands the Treasury Secretary the power to open an account for your child himself. And what it actually says is that he can do it if, quote, if the secretary determines based on information available to the secretary from tax returns or otherwise, that such individual meets requirements, end quote. I mean, strip away the legal padding off that sentence, and it means literally the government using your tax returns or whatever else it happens to have on your family can decide whether or not your child qualifies to open an account without you in the room. You see that, my friends, is what we call a sliding permission scale, because today that might not be the case. According to privacy laws, but the fact that this was baked into the One Big Beautiful Bill Act tells you that they are expecting at some point for this to be the case. And like I said, a privacy law is currently standing in the way, and their own lawyers acknowledge that it blocks them, for now, from opening a Trump account without the parent's permission, so nobody's going to be opening an account on your 10-year-old this afternoon. But look at what they did anyway. They left that authority in the bill. And so when you put both halves together, the shape is hard to miss. For newborns, they are engineering this automatic version into the birth process itself, and for the older children, it Looks like they've already written themselves into the authority to act off of records that you may have given them years ago. And look, if this was truly some sort of gift, right, for your child, some sort of starter seed money that could grow into something beautiful that your child could then later invest in themselves with, then that would be great, but it wouldn't be built like this. I mean, you do not build out two separate mechanisms to reach every single child in the country and hand yourselves the authority to bypass the parents entirely if this was just some sort of gift. You do it for something that you need every single citizen before they're 18 to have. And so the question becomes, what is that thing? So as it stands right now, your child's given a social security number at birth. You know, they always have it and it always is assigned to them. And it's not until they're usually 18 and older that it starts getting applied to them because they start getting jobs and they're able to pay into it. So from age zero to 18, that number sits on his own and doesn't really do anything. There's not much that can be invested into it. What they didn't have, at least not until now, was a way to switch that number on and have it wired to something live, right? In the moment that your social security number is live, the moment you start paying taxes to it or anything like that, it starts doing the one thing that a number alone could never do, which is start to sort you. Let's think about it just in terms of data alone, right? And what this account can read to the government about your family. You know, if you put money into it every month, your child looks like they came from resources. stable, a safe bet, someone that they don't have to worry about being low income and having to borrow from the government. But if you leave it at the $1,000 that was ceded by the government and never touch it again, well, that reads as data too, because an empty account is not nothing. What an empty account does is give them a data point for how willing you are to invest in your child, how much money perhaps you make if the $20 you had extra that week went towards groceries, or if it went to your kid's Trump account. I mean, essentially, once this thing becomes live, there's no way that it doesn't say something about you and your family. And so that's what I think the real scary thing here is, that they need a reason to switch that social security number on, like they're going to apply it to more instances than just Trump accounts. And we don't have to look too hard to see another country that's built a version of this. And it's China with its social credit system. Now, the acronym for China's social credit system is capital S, lowercase o, capital C, capital S. Remember that because it's going to come back later. But before you pull up the version of this that you already have in your head, probably, let me be clear about what China's social credit system is and what it is not. Because the picture that most people carry around is not the most accurate version of it. In many ways, it's become this hyperbole, this cartoonish version of it. It's the one you likely know from Black Mirror, or quite frankly, lazy and Western propagandized reporting that gives you this idea of it being a single number that floats above your head, right? Rising when they behave and dropping when they don't. And if that number falls too low, then maybe you can't, for example, use the coffee shop down the road. You have to use a different one. But that caricature, as it turns out, is hardly a fact. Now, I am basing my findings off of research done by Merix, which is the largest China research institute in Europe, along with research done by Jeremy Daum, a senior fellow at Yale who has spent years reading China's own government documents and separating what is real from what got exaggerated. And what they found is that China did try to build that nationwide personal score in a handful of isolated test cities, but that it mostly stalled out. And while everybody spent time arguing about whether or not that one social credit number actually existed, China had been wiring their separate government databases together. This included their tax system, their courts, their customs, their banks, and their regulators, all of it keyed into a single identity and pulled into one national hub. And the moment that all of those databases can start yapping to one another, then you can assemble a complete real-time picture of any single person out of every one of those systems at once. And according to China's own National Development and Reform Commission, the agency that runs this system says that that hub is real and is running today. They even say that as of this last year, it held more than 80 billion records in it. And for businesses, it was already working like a dashboard where one single flag inside one agency can all of a sudden shut the door for you inside another. And the really important thing to remember in all of this is that that single identity number that China has is the whole reason any of this works. Every citizen carries one of them for life and it is their ID, their tax number, their bank number, everything all at once. Now in America, we don't have a number like that. Well, at least we're not supposed to. But that is exactly what I believe our social security number is being turned into. And to see exactly how, I think you have to go back and you have to see exactly what the social security number was originally built for. So when social security numbers were originally created in 1936, it had exactly one job, which was to track how much you had earned so that the government could pay you back the right amount when you had retired. That's how we get the social security administration. But people were even uneasy back then because a single government number on every citizen sounded like the government operating a file on everyone, not just tracking payments that they owe. And so there was a promise that this would not be used for anything more than just bookkeeping. In fact, you can still read that promise on old cards. It says printed right at the bottom that this is for social security and tax purposes only, not for identification. And it's that promise that is exactly what left this so defenseless. Because think about it, When they say it for social security purposes only that could mean a lot of things depending on which administration decides what to make the Social Security Administration be And now digitize that and you no longer have a card that says this cannot be used for identity. You've now handed a country a key with no law around it and swore that it would only ever open one door. Well, I guess in some ways it will only open one door. But behind that door is about to be all of our databases. And you know, there are two pieces to this that you would need to turn that number into what China has, which is that one single key. And they are being built right now in this administration. The first is the hub, okay, somewhere to pull all of that separate federal data together, you know, the same way that China's national platform does. And unfortunately for us, it looks like this administration is already standing one up. It's called the Genesis mission. And it is worth noting that the core of it is something called the American Science Cloud, which in shorthand, they have named AMSC. And you know, it's because of that capitalization that it reminded me of what China uses for their social currency system. Remember that? I told you to remember it. S-O-C-S. And I'll admit that the similarities between the acronyms are a little too close for comfort. All right? I don't love it. However, I know that letters alone do not prove anything, nor would I pretend that they do. But when you look into what the Genesis mission is, you know, the machine itself and what it's programmed to do, you realize how close it is to that kind of reality. And look, I have a more in-depth video on the Genesis mission that I recommend watching if you want to do a real deep dive. But in short, the Genesis mission by definition has a goal of being one connected government controlled environment built to pull databases together across the entire federal government. And they tell you that it's a research tool for scientists and that it's going to cure cancer. And sure, maybe it is all of those things, but it is also the same category of machine that China has spent the past decade building for their social currency system. Anyways, the second piece of this that we need to be watching are the doors, right? Because they all trace back to one office, the National Design Studio. Now, NDS was created by executive order, and it is staffed largely with people out of Doge. And its official job, according to them on paper, is to clean up the government's websites and build fewer of them, right? To consolidate them, make it simpler to navigate. Meanwhile, what I found from the National Design Studio is not a refurbished remaking of these websites. It's that they keep standing up brand new websites for the government. And it keeps duplicating .gov websites under the executive branch. That's right, under the executive office of the president. And I go over how I found a second vote.gov and passports.gov running under the executive office of the president through National Design Studio and other videos. But I bring that up here to illustrate that they are nowhere near finished building this thing out. I mean, look at what they've already reached into and what websites they've put on display. You've got OPM, the Trump card, Trump Rx. I mean, they We even built the website for the Genesis mission itself, the hub I just showed you. I mean, piece by piece, the same office is pulling at your health, your money, your movement, your politics, and your identity from the day that you are born into one single key. And that key is your social security number. And if you think I'm being hyperbolic or dramatic, then take a look at what ICE has gotten access to over the past year. In 2025, the Social Security Administration agreed to hand over ICE the identity and location information on tens of thousands of people a month. This included phone numbers and email addresses and IP addresses. All of it matched under one social security number. How were they able to do that? Well, it was all thanks to the IRS, who around the same time opened its own tax records to immigration enforcement. Yeah, and those tax records, lest we forget, are all run on your what? Let's say it together, folks. Social security number. But do you see how before they were able to make that connection, they had to get another federal agency to open up its information before they could then connect that information to the person that they found. See, you assume that the government, just because it has all of this information on you, can just make these connections anyway. So what does it matter when the reality is that they can't? Because if they could, they would have, and they can't. So they're doing this instead. And a whistleblower inside Social Security said that Doge officials had taken an entire copy of the master file, meaning every number ever issued, along with names, birthdates, and citizenship before moving it onto a private cloud they could reach without the usual restrictions. And you know, here's the last thing about social security numbers that I just can't seem to get out of my head. You know, for almost 90 years, that number only ever looked backward. It recorded what you'd already done and you had to go live an actual life before it had anything to say about you at all. But a Trump account flips that. You know, because now the number carries a file that opens on you the day that you were born, built out of the circumstances of the people around you all before you've ever made one single choice of your own. And in that way, it stops being a record of your past and starts becoming a forecast of your future. And while a record judges what you already did and then uses that information to decide what you should be able to do next, a forecast decides what you will probably do before you've even had the mind to do it. And while the technology to do all of this is basically almost ready, I don't think where this ends up has anything to do with technology I think it has everything to do with whether anyone still deciding whether those walls that are up Are worth keeping up or at least fighting to keep up which brings us to the inevitable question of What do we do about this? Well, I can tell you one thing. All right We don't wait until these databases are finished until we ask whether or not they should exist The way I see it the fastest force that's capable of stopping something like this is a federal court See, state attorney generals are much faster than Congress because they can ask a judge for an emergency order that is halting additional data transfers, suspending cross-agency access, all while preserving every database, contract, and access log while the full system is still being investigated. But in order to bring something like that to action, their lawyers are going to need a lot more than just public concern or a couple of people sending them the Dre dossier's substack. They need an organized legal referral showing the documented transfers, potential violations, evidence of immediate harm, and the specific relief that is being requested. And luckily, I've been preserving a separate private evidence log saved on my own hard drives filled with what the National Design Studio has been doing for months. And from everything that I've mapped out, I believe that we have plenty to support an injunction. Which is why I've prepared and submitted an emergency legal referral and preservation request to California Attorney General Rob Bonta's office. specifically for review by the special litigation and privacy attorneys at California's DOJ. I've not only asked them to determine whether California has the grounds to seek an emergency order, but also to lead or join a multi-state action. And so if you live in California, and only if you live in California, I mean it, call Attorney General Bonta's office and urge him to review my request. Now, if you get nervous on the phone and don't know what to say, don't worry, I have provided a script for you that will be available on my sub stack as well for free. And And if you're outside the state of California, then please, the best thing you can do is keep this story circulating. Because if we don't let up, then it makes it harder for them to ignore it. And just remember, the next time you see a National Design Studio website with its clean and new and fresh font and a gold eagle stamped at the bottom of it, don't listen to what it's promising it'll do for you. Instead, ask what it's connecting about you. What picture it's wanting to see. then ask whether these data silos they call friction was ever really the problem or if it was the only thing that was truly keeping you free. So think for a second the impact that this effort will have if you just look even at just a couple of agencies. Let's look at social security. So by far the largest user base of any product that the government offers. 200 million plus people are involved, intersect with, have some connection to social security card, social security account and eventually social security benefit be paid out to them. This touches pretty much everybody. You know, when you're born in the United States, you get a social security number. It's a central promise of our society. It's a central promise.