A quiet change to President Donald Trump’s namesake savings program for children amounts to a gift for billionaires, according to an economic analyst.
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In an article for The Bulwark on Thursday, economics columnist Catherine Rampell said the Trump administration now allows wealthy donors to stock Trump Accounts with shares of individual companies, which families have no way to turn down. In effect, “our president is helping rich donors offload overvalued stocks onto children, who are forced to hold the stocks for five years whether they want to or not.”
Trump Accounts were created by last year’s “One Big Beautiful Bill,” which set up tax-deferred savings for every American child and seeded newborns’ accounts with $1,000 in federal money. The Trump administration recently auto-enrolled every eligible child, pushing participation past 70 million.
Rampell credited that fix, noting that the concept of “baby bonds” once drew support from both Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX). But she said last week’s rule change turned an inoffensive idea into something far more troubling.
Under the new rule, donors may give stock grants to groups of at least 5,000 children in a given age bracket and region. SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell has already pledged shares of Elon Musk’s company to millions of kids. Recipients generally cannot sell donated shares for five years.
Rampell argued that the lockup works in donors’ favor. Executives tend to unload stock when they expect it to drop, and a donation lets them claim a deduction on shares that might soon lose much of their value.
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“And in this case, the gift recipient is a captive audience, which may help set a sort of price floor on a falling stock,” Rampell wrote.
She also questioned whether the policy is legal, pointing out that Congress limited the accounts to low-cost index funds tracking U.S. companies. Families who object to owning a weapons maker, a casino operator or a company their employer forbids them to hold have no recourse.
Rampell also pointed to the regulation itself, which states donors hope a five-year holding period may lead families to “feel that they have a stake in the fate of the corporation.”
“They just…said it out loud,” she wrote.
“In short, this is about enlisting American kids in Trump-style transactionalism, right from birth,” Rampell concluded.
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